Hammer Horror: The Vampire Lovers, a misc. movies fanfic

The Vampire Lovers: A History of Evil

By Joachim von Hartog

Translated and adapted from the original Austro-Bavarian by Elphinstone Dalrymple

'The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.

To swing from deep, profound emotion to no emotion at all.'

Dr. Terry Sinton MB ChB FRCPA

'And it is only through flesh that spirit lives.'

Joseph Andriano

For Eric Barclay Donaldson

Once when the sky was midnight blue

I knelt and prayed and summoned you

To rise up from your restless grave

I'd do your bidding, be your slave

Then as the sky churned nightmare black

You whispered sweet your answer back

Enticed me to your carnal crypt

Into a silken coffin slipped

Enrapt me in your vampire wings

And taught me all Death's pleasured things

And vowed before the sterling moon

I would return in darkness soon.

Chapter 1

Memoriam

In which Baron Hartog explains the nature of the vampire and tells how he avenged the death of his sister.

Stiria, 1794.

From my crumbling manor in the old town of Těšín Silesia, I write the chronicle you are about to read, and believe me, however wild it may seem, every word of it is true. Recorded in its ghastly pages is much more than an old-wives' tale intended to caution wayward children for unruly behaviour. As they huddle nervously beneath the bed covers, terrified by the sound of the wind in the eaves or the movement of a shadow in the chink under the door, you too will shudder as you ponder the inhuman spectre who haunts these pages. This story is much more than a terrifying legend, much more than a fantasy that I have made up in a dream delirium. Nevertheless, it is indeed a strange history, a tale of unspeakable cravings, one that speculates upon immortality and of how un-death haunts the byways that circumvent the vast provinces of Hell. It is a caveat against the demon who assumes the form of the supple, love-haunted female flesh, of a beauty steeped in the poisoned bowl of Lilith. Those who drink from that cursed cup are damned! Well might you mock and laugh a derisive laugh, but if the spirit be indeed tortured by superstition, let this testament stand as a warning and may this memoriam be not forgotten. For even as I finish this sentence, so in God's trust ends my account of the fearsome and savage Karnsteins, and with that, if I have done my work well, shall their unnatural race be damned to the deepest pits of the abyss and wiped clean from the face of the earth. Never were a viler bloodline visited upon the world. Never, perhaps except for the notorious Count Dracula, has there existed a more cruel and lecherous and violent race of nobles. Before God, may we be spared from these supernatural happenings again.

On the map, within the Circle of Austria, bordering the territories of Poland and Hungary and the province of Szathmar, is marked the Duchy of Stiria. It is a country steeped in both Germanic and Slavonic tradition, a margraviate to the Austrian Crown kept insulated from civilization by a rigid spine of lofty snow-capped mountains. To the north, the Duchy, for most of its breadth is split by these mountains, and the rocky peaks extend eastward to the distant Turkish dominions. Southward lies Italy and the Adriatic. Beyond the mountains is to be found the gala city of Vienna and to the west the teeming metropolis of Salzburg. Flowing from the high peaks and eastward the river tributaries will lead you in the direction of the Transylvanian city of Ramnicul Valcea, and beyond that to the pass at Turnu Rosu, and from there you travel into a land that is almost unknowable.

Cresting over these alpine heights the morning sun burns away the night's pale mists, evaporating the fogs into glorious days with blue painted skies. This region, upon the Austro-Hungarian frontier, because of its altitude, is composed of a storied landscape. On the hilly, lushly verdant slopes are both pastures and forests. In the sunny meadows the farmer herds his goats and cows, their iron bells clang hollowly as they graze among the verdant fields. In the hedges songbirds twitter, and the upward rolling fields are abundant with yellow and white flowers, butterflies and bees pollinate the prettily scented petals. Along the terraces wine grapes hang on the vine like purple and white confections, sparkling with dew.

On the edge of the fields are the forests, cool and sylvan deeps that play host to many a species of bird and beast. Camouflaged in the shifting light are timid deer, fleet and ethereal amid the shadows. Both the lower plains and the higher climes of the Stirian hills are pleated with corkwood and pine forests, with sacred oaks and fertile walnuts, its byways are planted with prickly ash all mottled with a distinctive grey-green bark. Rising with the vertiginous mountain inclines the conifers thicken and reach skyward in stepped tiers. The woods are home to the common partridge and the pheasant, the spotted woodpecker and the cuckoo. Aloft in the skies the alpine swift, kites, kestrels and hawks soar and tumble in the high breezes, and their rapid plunges to the earth are a spectacle that will take away your breath. For those who journey in these parts, there are many a burgh and many a village to visit, settlements that evoke a colourful Teutonic past.

Numerous such hamlets lie along the ways that connect the German and Romanian provinces, and if you take respite in one on the rustic village inns, those that sport unimaginative names like 'The Running Boar' or 'The Key and Crown', you will observe from your loft room that the towns too are built into levels and layers. Cobbled streets arise in stages, linked by steps, sometimes three or four, and sometimes by many more, and only certain common ways allow for a horse, cart or carriage to pass. All the towns are embraced by lush woodlands, green with fern and a carpeting of pine needle, and because of this you may be inclined to engage in an early constitutional forest walk. In your walk, you might climb several picturesque ridges and valleys, and if you take with you a spying glass you may be lucky enough to see some of those wonderful but unfamiliar creatures in their mountain high habitat. Hiking ever upward you will at length come upon the pleasing vista of the numerous castle ruins that dot the countryside. Some ruins stand high above the tiny villages, while others rise secluded over caldera lakes where the blue waters shimmer their reflections in hallucinatory cerulean symmetry. These views always arouse awe and astonishment, for they are the images of fairy tale castles reflected in the surface of a mirror, with turrets all shining white stone in the sunshine.

Imagine too, an artist's landscape of pure lacustrine waters in which trout and whitefish are to be found in abundance, and fishing is as much a staple of the peasant table as it is for the sport of tourists. The higher climes, as I have said, bring forth springs and streams that are fed from these lakes, streams that run with sweet and clear drinking water into the lower lands and onward. The morning mist hangs like a veil over many an ethereal marsh and mere, and on these placid waters may be glimpsed the wraith-like heron or the delicate swan. Eventually these waters flow into rivulets and these in turn flow into the broader rivers of the Muehr and the Danube. Like the great Euphrates, the many-headed Hydra of Greek legend, these rivers converge to snake all the way through the Bohemian kingdom and onward to the Black Sea.

In the villages, the peasantry toils at wine making, dairy farming and timber cutting and carpentry. Daily life dictates that the people have little time for recreation, for they work tirelessly throughout the golden summer days and retire early in the white-dusted winter nights. Their industry is ceaseless, and although they are mostly pleasant, they have little time to waste on tourists. Still, dear traveller, if you find this your destination there is much to enjoy, for all about is a marvel for the eye to behold. But even as fortitude must be your guide, alas this fairy tale Stirian scenery is both lushly beautiful yet somehow indescribably hostile. Despite this region's indisputable beauty, it is truth that the terrain, if you are unfamiliar with it, can prove quite dangerous. Stitched into this patchwork of fertile meadows and vales are those previously noted tiny hamlets that oft huddle under a feudal monument and that monument most predominantly that fairy tale castle that has long ago fallen into ruin.

Fear nourishes legend, and because of this you must leave reason upon your own doorstep when you depart your native lands for this place. Any peasant will assure you that these airy heights are indeed splendid to look upon, but they also warn that visitors should not adopt a cavalier attitude to local custom and belief. Now, upon this advice, take pause, for although I have painted a pretty landscape, I must now darken it with a sombre hue. This region with its rivers and mountains and lofty castles may evoke a lost and stormy bygone era, but do not be fooled with romantic daydreams, for despite the obvious beauty and the physical dangers, there are other threats in this country, perils of a treacherous and secretive, perhaps metaphysical nature of which you should be made aware. When visiting here be warned, it is best to procure the services of a knowledgeable guide to take you, if you can find one, lest you wander from the path and hear the howls of the wolf or encounter the claws of the bear. Near the forest path lurk other predatory beasts, and you will start in terror at the cry of the nightjar. It is said that sorcerers will summon the werewolf to tear your flesh asunder. Few people in this district will offer you their services if you wish to insist on engaging in such reckless endeavour. However, the dangers to which I allude do not belong to the world of reason, but they are recorded in ancient historical tracts, those names never spoken aloud.

It might be concurred that the ways of the local people are simple and crude compared to the culture and sophistication of the cities of Rakesburg or Graz, nonetheless, you must leap the cultural divide to understand that such is the demarcation between the primitive and the civilised. Once within this domain the traveller must forgo all that is urbane and traverse with cautious step the Stirian heartland, guided only by mile stones erected in ancient Roman times. Standing alone, in the high alpine forest, and looking upon a sublime ruin will prove to you without doubt that there can be no place that is more removed from civilisation, nowhere more remote than these parts. If it is fear that suddenly grips you, then you must make haste and return across the mountains. If you wish to go back to the comfortable world from whence you came and not be pursued by bad dreams, go now! Some will find that this world, unlike theirs, is not governed by modern rationale, and that in this realm there is bred superstition and terror.

Approached from the direction of Vienna, perhaps the mountains serve as a barrier to Stiria. Beyond the mountains one finds that the ancient market towns, monuments and cloisters are inhabited by a people who seem only sporadically friendly and are hesitantly hospitable. A stranger is a stranger in this land, and as we are told from the time that we are children, one should never trust a stranger. Nonetheless the stranger might come upon your door, and if you do not take heed, you will invite them into your home. Let it be advised that newcomers to this region bring with them their city attitudes and often fail to pay credence to the peasant's warnings. Foreigners so readily forfeit sensibility for the price for their ignorance, by reaping a dark harvest of tragedy and evil in their foolish disregard for safety. Sometimes, even as we are primed, we are still duped.

Not so long ago a young couple eloping from their Bavarian families, disappeared in these parts, never to be seen again. It is whispered that the young bride, Marianne, was seduced by a kiss of evil, that she died and later returned from the grave. A troupe of carnival gypsies similarly vanished. How foolishly they had jested that they had come to steal the silver from dead men's eyes! Beneath the beauty of Stiria there lurks a grim hostility. In this you will need to understand that although the peasant ways are unfamiliar to you, so is your civilised erudition unbeknown to them. The comforts of refinement and sophistication might well find you happily living life in the sumptuous lap of luxury, made fat on good foods and superior in education, knowing the sparkle of gas lights and entertainment. In Vienna you will tell yourself, there is affluence and plenty, there is education and not superstition, there is light as opposed to shadow. There is reason and there is truth. In glittering spleandour you may dance and be gay in the great manor houses of the rich, or you may diligently study the sciences at renowned academies or universities. You may even visit some of the less than respectable addresses such as the notorious Ringstrasse if you are so inclined. Moreover, for those who live in the cities the cultured metropolitan world is an indubitably different realm. However, in the hinterland you must forsake the sparkling and festive and sophisticated world of Vienna for the rural and the meagre and the unknown. City people have little time for the rustic ways and the beliefs of the common people count as nothing. The metropolitan citizen oft lives in contempt of their pastoral brethren, for the bucolic peasantry live and breathe folktales and surely that is foolish? Yet folktales have a habit of being more than just superstition and the deeper into the country of Stiria you go, the more profound the beliefs become.

My name is Joachim von Hartog and I have experienced the darker side of such beliefs. Trust me when I say that I am not so willing as are many others to dismiss my fear as mere imagination. Think not for a moment that I have been the slave of some deranged phantasy, for in my homeland of Moravia, retired to my doomed manor in the old town of Těšín Silesia, I have spent the last forty years pondering the nature and the consequences of evil. If grim legend recapitulates a terrible past, and my hands have been sticky with blood, then reality catches me gazing into a void of madness. Here, in this province, the native superstitions still hold strong, and is it any wonder that they segue so easily into those of the neighbouring Stirian people? Although most would profess to be God fearing folk who pray to the Lord and obey his commandments, the old beliefs have never actually died. Like my kinsmen, I know it is not so forgivable or so wise to reject such tales, and modern science in refute of God will find many shortcomings as it attempts to explain the metaphysical. There are things that must exist, things that are in breach of scientific learning, things that are borne of the dark, suckled by evil, and that require our sterling faith in God's truth if we are to defeat them.

Regard me a superstitious hypocrite if you will, and deride me doubly when I tell you that I hold title, that of Baron, and by that title might I have built my courage upon the shoulders of privilege. Nonetheless title alone does not a brave man make nor does it magically grant one an intelligence to equal that of Goethe's. Although mine is a title to which I was born, many have mistakenly thought that it is a Baronetcy awarded in bravery. No doubt this is because I entered the military service not long after the events I now relate. Alas, I did fight in battle, alongside my rather estranged friend the General Spielsdorf, a man who commanded respect despite his peculiarities. Nonetheless, I confess quite openly that I possess no stomach for the glory of conflict. Regardless of my personal reserve, I did not fight for glamour, and war has never brought unto my soul the fiery ecstasy that it sometimes inspires in the breasts of others. I scarce consider myself heroic, yet even so I still hold fear close to my soul, for mankind's clash with barbarism goes beyond the blood-stained battlefield and beyond the tenable demarcations that define civilisation. There are worse things, worse terrors than those perpetrated by war. Let it be here stated that although this new and glorious Age of Enlightenment might serve as cynosure to most, I believe that even it must bow to the divine power and be wary of the workings of the Devil.

Yet contrarily do I stand steadfast, and no doubt you will call me a fraud and a heretic, when I say, despite my absolute Catholic faith, I still give an unspoken credence to the parochial teachings of my grandparents. The former ways, artifacts from those times before the true Christian God, are teachings that are difficult to cast off, especially if they have formed the basis of your childhood. It is difficult to explain, so perhaps before you judge me it is best to understand that my kin were of an older and earthier culture. My Grandmother did not take lightly the powers of evil and she often knew when evil crossed our boundaries. She was a true believer in the ancient customs and had little time for Christianity. Her name was Dorkó, and she had been taught by her mother defensive spells and sympathetic magic, talents that she swore were used to ward off the nightmare and guard against the dark forces. Her predictive powers were of no use when evil covertly crossed our threshold, and thus made a mockery of the old gods in favour of our true Lord, Jesus Christ.

In a clime where such women were often sent to the fires to burn, perhaps you might wrongfully assume that our family title served as protection or that we were disingenuously allied to the Devil. To any outsider this may have been a critically astute observation, however, nothing could have been further from our truth. Yes, we lived in a comfortable tenure and indeed we had cultivated vast tracts of farming land and owned game-stocked woods, but the Hartogs were never tyrants. In defence of my Grandmother, and saddened was I upon her death, she was highly regarded as a healer and midwife, and she knew the ways of nature unequivocal. Never was her character predisposed to vice or voluptuousness, though it was whispered that she could not be governed by normal conventions. If she had gathered sphagnum moss to brew up soporific drugs, if she had dug up mandrake and concocted salves and philtres, she had also attended to the birth of many of the villagers. Dorkó had tutored me from a young age about the value of understanding the natural world in which we lived, even though I now understand that this world is governed by a higher being. Although she did not credit the Roman faith that had replaced in my heart the relics of the old ways, within me Dorkó instilled the notion that if I believed, truly believed in whatever conviction I chose, that the natural world could never be forsaken. Through this faith I would find protection in its embrace against any evil. My Grandmother did not rebuke me in my choice of faith, but instead guided. Her advice was that I should never dismiss the earth as irrelevant, for it was the loam from which we as human beings had sprung and it was the bosom to which we must return. I yet confess that I moved away from such belief in favour of my God. Nonetheless, how difficult it is to completely disavow the past. My Grandmother said that I should have courage in the face of fear, for how this protection would manifest in my time of need would be dependent upon how one used one's resources. Although I am not now a follower of the primitive doctrine with its intimacy for the darker side of nature, my adulthood has found in me the truthful, shining light of the one true God, Jesus Christ.

I assert that some of the magical rites my Grandmother passed on to me, can never be erased. Towards the end of her life she lived most precariously, and I even recall that she had enlisted, as comate, a strange and peripatetic young hunchback peddler who tavelled throughout the region. Vividly do I recall his face, a man with one eye from who she oft traded herbs for him to place in amulets and sell to 'afflicted' maidens. These fetishes were also given to labouring mothers and to those who were tortured by the incubus. The hunchback, I remember, was nevertheless, an amiable fellow, and my Grandmother liked him well enough. Still to this day do I remember his uneven gait, his one eye, his hump and the tinkling sounds of the tiny brass bells jingling on his crooked staff. True it is that because I recall these things so vividly, that I still perform almost by rote, rites that yet haunt my dreams and give me cause for reservation. These are practices of which I never tell a soul, and I wonder if my God will punish me in my uncivilised weakness when I at last close my eyes in death. Is it any wonder that I can choose a plant for a medicinal, tie a knot to bind evil, observe the weather and portend suggestive omens by looking at the stars, even as I pray, a crucifix clasped in my trembling fingers? Of these talents I never tell, for you would call me counterfeit and who could blame you if you scoff?

Often, when I am pensive or in a sombre mood, such thoughts echo inside my head, and I pray for forgiveness because I remember with absolute clarity the things my Grandmother taught. However, had I not called upon that past I believe that many would be dead. Thus, have I acted justly and thus hopefully I will be granted the Lord's grace in my final hour. In wild contradiction to this magical past I wear and believe in the power of the holy cross. It is my faith that gives me courage, but faith is conviction, and it demands a suspension of belief, even in the face of a truly hideous certainty. I do not wear the cross simply as adornment, for the cross to me is the symbol of devotion and of the true nature of sacrifice that has bled throughout the twisting evolution of the Christian spirit. Therein that dedication I shall find succour, for it glows with my hope in the holy protection of the one Lord and Saviour, and he indeed alone shall judge my actions and he alone is my protector!

The world of the preternatural does exist, to this I most profoundly attest, and mankind of all creed and caste have been tormented and vexed by its power since the Serpent first slithered into Eden. Yet no matter what the spoken tongue, evil is no less universal, and its monsters reach toward us from the shadows, to swallow the sun and enslave our world in darkness. My Grandmother warned that the powers of evil become manifest among humankind when their passions are vehemently aroused. The demons of darkness lust and they covet and they seduce and destroy. So, it is that I struggle to remain unstained and pure, for against such filth I must be guarded. Of evil and its various forms am I cautioned, guarded against the tempting flesh, and believe me, I do not jest, for I am sincere when I tell you that there are materialisations of the black arts that form within the various dominions of man. They come disguised in numerous and deceptive forms, for the principalities of evil are widespread and infectious; sometimes innocuous and sometimes charming. Do not be fooled, for those influences, once ill met, might bring catastrophe among the good. I have always considered myself fair and righteous in everything I did, that I was careful to measure the good of every man against any sleight. In this way, I knew courage and humility. Nonetheless, because of those unreserved notions was I foolish and blinded and damned. I did not for a moment think that my happiness would flow so darkly into the river of my tears. Thus, in the shadow of my Grandmother am I compelled in the perpetual struggle against the night, and to watch for the signs that the befouled are walking among us. For one day, unannounced, the damned arrived upon our doorstep.

However, before you laugh away my tale and judge me the victim of a mad hallucination, yet must I plead that you have trust in its veracity, and, come with me if you dare, and I will take you on an adventure far from Vienna's candlelit palaces and glittering ballrooms and into the dim woods, into the ash forests, into the mountainous and begotten regions, into the sylvan heartlands of Moravia and Stiria. Though be warned, for you will enter a twilight world of unspeakable horror. For those who might dare to read it, this is my 'History of Evil', and I swear once again that every word of that history is true. Should you read it you may have cause to pause in fear the next time a branch scrapes against the eaves, or when the clock strikes midnight. Perhaps you may wish to take a nervous glance under the bed before you retire, or perhaps you may want to leave the candle burning throughout the night and tremble nervously in the slight comfort its weak illumination may bring. Be assured of this, you are not alone in your fears for even I still quake at the monstrous thought of what has passed. For the sunshine brings no solace and the horror yet exists. It writhes within the shape of shadows, it whispers of unnatural longings and sighs and laughs mockingly. The dark stalks like a thief, a murderer and it causes the flesh to quiver and in the weak it drives the mind to insanity and no joyous dance or studious rationale can ever be the antidote to fear. For the dark hours propagate terrible things that even I might once have foolishly discredited as belonging to the poisoned realm of the old ways, things that God should not permit to walk amidst his flock, and yet they do. Alas such fiendish demoniac forms, the mercenaries of Satan are manifest in the world of man and believe me when I tell you that the night is filled with perverted creatures that find their victims everywhere.

I put down my pen and from its tip blooms a drop of ink that might just as well be a drop of blood. Both ichors and negritude are blackened and befouled by the close company of death and each has recorded dreadful events. Here, in this book, is presented a history so unbelievable that I still wish to think it all a terrible dream. Between its covers you will find yourself caught in the liminal space that is neither sanity nor madness. No, my mind is not of a fever nor am I seduced by lunacy, for I have known in this tragedy a terrible despair and even now do I seek comfort in the graces of the Almighty. Yet believing this story a phantasy would be a boon, for if it were a dream then I would never have suffered so grievous a loss. The moment, the grimmest hour that I write these words, I am filled with a melancholy and a yearning for the loving smile and the sweet kisses of my doomed Isabella, and that bitterness shall never cease until justice is served and the blasphemers piled up before the gates of destruction.

In Memoriam

Isabella von Hartog

1775 – 1794

Rest in Peace

I place this memoriam card in the pages of my history and the book is closed, I pray forever. This card serves as a grim reminder of the temporal and fragile nature of our mortal lives and of the dreadful things that sometimes inhabit the likeness of our own skins. It is a tale of the nature of deception and how trickery and lies have the power to bring about calamity, and anyone can be deceived and anyone can suffer tragedy. I had the card printed in Graz, printed on the finest of bleached papyrus. Note that it is embossed with an overlapping black line border and amid the dual floral embellishment there is a decorative lily whose petals open like a chalice from which to pour out the soul.

If you could have known my lovely, sweet sister, even after the briefest acquaintance, you would have agreed that no finer young woman was ever met. Isabella had no peer, at least not to my eye. She was of an uncompromising virtue and possessed of a promise for life that shone upon all and dazzled those whom she knew. Verily she spent all her days making other people happy. This she did to such an extent that Isabella oft neglected her own joy. There were those who adored her pretty smile and there were those whose anxieties would simply melt away at the touch of her placid hand. Hers was a joy that delighted, strengthened, reassured and comforted. She was never proud, our dear Isabella, a girl whose exquisite, youthful lily was so cruelly, so viciously severed at the bud. Only in remorse must I now recall the pink flush of vitality that coloured her cheek and the sparkle of crystal that once flashed in her eyes. I still hear the harmony as of the tinkling of bells in her voice as she sang at the piano, and there was starlight and silver in the ebon lustre of her thick long hair. She used to wear it in a plait across her crown, and from her pale temples long ringlets cascaded down to her white shoulders. With a sigh of sadness, I grieve that I shall no longer feel the silken texture of those curls between my fingertips, or the sweet warmth of her lips on my cheek, the soft touch of her caress, the perfume from her dark hair, of her radiant skin. Isabella can only now haunt the lonely realms of my dreams.

Upon Isabella's coming of age my parents had anticipated that she might marry into a good family. Although I shared not their enthusiasm for Isabella to wed, a Baron and an Earl, both from neighbouring provinces and from equally respectable families had each expressed their hopes for courting the lovely young woman. That I felt somewhat envious should a handsome stranger woo Isabella away from our happy home, made life seem suddenly unbearable, yet little did I realise that an even more insidious horror would stalk from the shadows and rend all our lives into shreds as would the stab of a knife. A fortunate marriage and a happy life were not to be Isabella's destined fate. How devastated were my mother and father, the former who nurtured and the later that doted, suffering her untimely death? Both have never recovered. Mother wept every day and father became melancholic and distant. As for me, well, no words that I write here can express the agony of my loss. The suffering of dim Providence brutally covered all our hearts with a dark mantle and swallowed Isabella's purity and extinguished her young life in one horrible and suffocating embrace.

Here I say purity in that not only her flesh but her spirit was thus tainted, and yet how pitiless is Fate, so ruthless and brutal that it should take a blossom so fresh, one so gentle and kind from those who nurtured, from those who loved and propel it unto a lost eternity of blackness. Isabella was taken from us, yet still not destined for Heaven to be among the virtuous. In her final anguish, her soul was damned. I shudder that the torments of hell might still corrupt and wither her soul, and may God alone forgive! May this volume then commemorate not only her innocence and beauty forever and for always, but may it also act as aide memoire for any young woman of nineteen years, pretty and in the flourish of her maidenhood, that they take heed; for here documented is the horror that Isabella died a terrible death. Woe, be to those who shall not be forewarned! To those who may chance read its contents after I too have gone unto dust, take care. Here, in this black leather-bound tome I have written in full of how my sister died and how I, the Baron Hartog, avenged her death.

The enemy who infiltrated our lives was not an ordinary mortal, but a murderer from beyond the grave, and my sister had fallen victim to a creature spawned in Hell, a vampire. For those who do not know, vampires are those spirits of the dead that have refused a quiet grave. Vampires are known to inhabit and haunt the frontiers of many lands, and history records that only two score years ago an epidemic of vampirism held the Balkan countries in a grip of terror. Its victims were many, and its infections spread through many counties. Yet by what agency you may query does the scourge of vampirism cause the spirit to leave its grave? Why should the dead arise from beneath the crust of the earth and assume a form of ponderable matter to assault and torment the living? Because the vampire is like unto a leech that needs blood, warm, Elysian and pure human blood to nurture its unearthly body. They are the reanimated bodies of the suicide and the murderer, the rapine and the perverted. Vampires are damned to exist eternally, but to do so, they must feed upon the living. When such loathly shapes come upon humans they attack with cunning pertinacity. These ghosts when they visit mankind oft induce a swooning stupor, and that trance always leads to misery and death. Alas! The undead exhaust their victims, visiting every conceivable perversion upon them, consuming their lives in an unnatural courtship that leaves families shattered and lives destroyed.

Understand that the vampire is transmutable and its forms are varied, and it is known to be as a mist or as a mote of dust, it can take on the shape and likeness of other things, of living creatures that are recognised haunters of the dark. In the guise of animals, of wolves and bats and felines, and other daemonic familiars, they take to the night and stalk follies and grottos and abandoned castles and feed on fresh warm blood. Who has not heard tell of the depredations of the evil heretofore mentioned Count Dracula from Transylvania or the fiend who attacked the innocents in Cumberland's Croglin Grange? Despite the horrors, there are still defences against their attacks, for these hideous manifestations are bound by certain laws to which they must abide. For in some regions the fiend may not cross running water during the daytime passage of the sun, while in others the garlic herb, its tubers and flowers are said to be proof and potent against its vile contamination. Some of these spectres cannot walk in the sunlight while others are but weakened when exposed to it, and move with a declining lassitude in its warming rays. Despite this indolence they are free to move about in the daylight hours, to go from one household to another to spread their vile contamination. Some vampires fear religious symbols, and when they do come among us and attack in their phrency and in their lust for blood, yet may their horror be lessened, even temporarily banished by the cross or the crucifix if it cannot be completely repelled.

When they arise from their tombs to attack the living these fiends become a dreaded plague. Yea do I speak with integrity, and know this too, this terrible fact, that vampires have been known to resurrect themselves from the dead and to multiply. These monsters have extreme longevity and are familiar with all the tribulations of life. Often, they have travelled from province to province, learning new languages and new ways, assimilating into new cultures so easily that no one suspects that they are other. Nonetheless, there is one common law that restricts the ways of the un-dead, for they are alien to our world and its mandates, and at night, gorged and sated with the blood of their victims, the vampire must at some point take leave from its perfidious proclivities and return to its grave, bound in its cerements and hidden in the cold earth. They come among us to harangue the living and aye, if their extermination should not be correctly accomplished they will continue to seduce and to destroy. Should the living corpse be tracked to its lair and its vile flesh disinterred as it sleeps, such monstrous Spectrum might be eradicated, after which the shell must be reduced to ashes and those ashes scattered into the four winds.

I listen now only to the wind as it howls mournfully about the corner stones of our ruined home, and I long for the love that has departed yet do I know that such love can never be found again. So too has the love of my family been scattered to the winds, for tragically our home was decimated by such a demon, a creature that slept by day and walked by night, who smiled upon us with a sweet and gentle face. Foolishly we invited the fiend into our lives. Abiding the laws of hospitality these hosts must be bid enter, welcomed and protected, loved even as we love our own. Nothing is more artful and cunning as are these demons, for they destroy the generous personality and ruin decency. Unknowing are we and even doubting when we ultimately suspect all too late its dread intent. How compelling are these monsters, becoming devoted to their victim and casting a glamour into the eyes and the heart of the prey and deceiving the sympathies of their families.

For it is known that on rare occasions the vampire sometimes excites interminable and amorous desires within its intended, battening upon love gained through false pretences. When it does this the wooed are doomed. Be assured that there is a disgusting verisimilitude in their modus, for they are clever and will have your sympathies even as they are killing you. It will beguile its victim into covetous desires for its dead flesh. For the vampire might also condemn the prey to an unending twilight existence of bleak immortality like unto its own. Alas, duped, the victim is drawn into a passive form of parasitic subsistence. The victims themselves in their turn languish and die as did Isabella, and by the light of the moon, if the demon decrees, the victim returns from the grave, spawned from a ghostly netherworld only to feed upon those who loved them. Incredible you might think, and unthinkable, but true!

So thus, we are left to live out our lives in enduring sorrowing tones. Until our own day of reckoning, our existence upon earth must be marked forever by the dreadful malignancy that has passed over our threshold, having left its imprint of misery upon our doorstep. I thank God that such was not the fate of my beloved sister. At least she did not rise from the dead, thirsting for blood, for had that been so then perhaps I would not be here, among the living to record this history of evil. Nonetheless, so cruelly was her soul stained, and her innocence destroyed, that her entrance into Heaven is surely barred and forever denied. Mercy was granted my mother and my father in that Isabella left this life but did not walk again as the undead, however, her last moments were the moments of a compact with evil. Her desires were as unnatural as was the creature that had sapped away her life. It sickens me to tell that she was enamoured of the creature, yes, infatuated with all its filthy perversion, and that she had sampled with fervour the deadly passion of the vampire lovers.

Chapter 2

Unsuspecting Merrymakers

In which General Spielsdorf holds a celebratory birthday party for his niece, Laura, and how the beautiful guest Marcilla is invited to stay.

Stiria, 1830.

General Spielsdorf's house was aflame with candlelight and alive with music. Its stately rooms rang with the sound of melody and polka and merry cheer. The lilt of music and the trill of gay laughter had been spilling from the ballroom since the sun had gone down, flowing beyond the house and into the expansive park that abounded the great estate. As if in defiance of the darkness the candles lit the mansion till it sparkled as does a galaxy, and the mood was most certainly one of celebration and jollity. Despite the gaiety, the weather was on the brink of change, and a chill had begun to blow down from the mountains in the north. The brisk ruffle heralded the coming shift of season from autumn to winter. It had been pleasant and warm and not uncomfortable, but the edges of the leaves were crisping up now and turning sere and would soon be dropping from the twig. People would be closing their houses to guests and preparing for the arrival of frosty mornings dusted with snow, but not tonight for tonight was a gala occasion. It was the nineteenth birthday of his niece, Laura, and tonight was the occasion of her party. Just beyond the grand marble entrance of the General's house, where the steps ran between four magnificent Corinthian columns, there waited a carriage harnessed with two ivory horses. Perched in his box with a rug wrapped about his knees, the coach driver pulled his coat tighter about his belly. He had been summoned early, just when he had settled in the kitchen to the delight of a hot brew, to attend the main door and be ready for departure. He had hastily thanked the cook as he downed his sweet chocolate and the cook in her generosity had wrapped him some vanilla kipferl which he had folded carefully, so as not to crush them, into his coat pocket.

'It is not much from the party table, I daresay, but I think General Spielsdorf wouldn't mind, you being so handsome and all!'

'Not so handsome for that one, I should hope!' remarked the coach driver, and they both laughed together at the veiled meaning of the joke.

'Handsome enough for me, I'm sure,' said Gerta knowing the implication of her tease and smirking. 'Anyway, it will get cold on that road, better to have something sweet to remind you of me… to keep you warm...'

The coach driver blew her a suggestive kiss. 'I'd rather have more than a hot chocolate to keep me warm,' he had told Gerta, but he was not jesting.

'You should be so lucky,' she had bantered in return. She threw him an extra biscuit. 'Maybe that'll buy me a real kiss sometime?' They had both shared another friendly laugh and the coach driver felt a surge of heat flow through his loins.

'As many kisses as you want, Gerta,' he told her. 'Maybe I shall have the opportunity to come back, soon, yes?'

The cook gave him a shrewd smile and arched her eyebrows. 'You best get on your way!'

The coachman's journey of almost twenty kilometres to the west would take the best part of three hours, perhaps even more in the dark of the night and he was not looking forward to the drive. At night, the roads were difficult to navigate, for they wound through the forest and along narrow passes. Hopefully there would be no fog to veil the way. The coachman would be forced to travel slowly, and he would be fortunate too if he were to have Mr. Morton and his pretty daughter, Emma, home before the clock struck midnight. At least the biscuits in his pocket would make for a welcome snack in the chill of the evening. In the yellow glow of the coach lamp a moth fluttered, and both insect and flame trembled in the breeze, and the breeze reminded the driver that the night would surely get but colder. He suppressed a shiver and glanced impatiently toward the main door. Perhaps it was fortunate that his passengers had chosen to leave now.

Conrad glanced in the coachman's direction, stationed at the entrance to the house, the buckles on his blue and grey livery glinting as he stretched up onto the tips of his toes. It was good to loosen the tension in his leg muscles, for his calves had begun to cramp and his heels to hurt, and as he gently massaged the back of his neck he realised, with slight discomfort that under the weight of powder and puff, he had developed an annoying itch. Conrad could not wait to retire and to undress. Briefly he thought of Birgit, a maidservant at the neighbouring Bullheimer estate. Now there was a young woman who could quell any itch. Conrad conjured up her splash of red hair and her fair face, the high and ample breasts and swaying hips. He sighed deeply and felt a little thrill pass through his thighs, but decided, for the sake of any sudden embarrassment, that it was best to shelve thoughts of Birgit for the moment. He gave a slight wave to the coach driver and then turned and looked to the entrance towards the glittering ballroom. He had been posted by the door for some hours now, watching the people come and go, ushering them into the house from their gilded carriages.

The music, the laughter and the chatter had been a constant buzz in his ear, and he mused for a bit, imagining that he himself were one of those handsome gentry, dancing in the ballroom with any one of those lively, pretty girls, rather than standing here as stout and rigid as a plank. His phantasy was glorious just for one brief and sweet moment, but he too, like the coach driver wished himself somewhere other, a soft bed and in the warm embrace of a young wench perhaps, but for neither of them was the night yet over. The coachman tipped his hat to the doorman and they both exchanged a courtesy in the candle lighted shadows. The wind picked up a gust and rippled about the pilasters, gusted over the balusters and around the quoins and when it met the coach it jingled the tiny silver bells on the harness traces, making one of the horse's stamp and snort, blasting from its nostrils a little visible puff of mist in the night air.

Inside the great house a chamber orchestra of violin and piano played a fleet and lively polka. Standing at the perimeter of the glittering ballroom, General Spielsdorf smiled as he watched the dancers whirl by to the tempo of the popular tune. The sparkling light cast by a myriad chandelier candles washed over the polished timber floors and lit the gaudy oils of a dozen mythological friezes in their gilt frames. Pretty girls spun about in dizzying circles of gold and silver brocade, their colourful gowns a kaleidoscope of primrose and pink, swishing against stocking clad ankles, silk flowers and sequins adorning their low-cut bodices, felicity shining in their eyes. Handsome young men in military uniforms and others in buttoned evening dress partnered the girls in the dance. The warm light made the dance floor into a mirrored lake of spectrums and reflections, it made a scarlet flame of the General's military regalia, his lapels, epaulettes and buttons twinkling gold, and it made jewels of his sky-blue eyes.

Although those eyes sparkled there was a hint of melancholy about them that supposed he was not so happy, a look of longing perhaps and even a trace of sadness that the General could not fully conceal. Though he seemed to have every reason to be happy, as happy as any man could be, for he had a fine house that commanded almost three hundred acres, assured wealth and all the privilege that came with that wealth. Still, this great sprawling holding, which he had purchased some years ago upon his retirement, was far from a happy home. Its vast halls and fifty rooms had proved no haven, even though the General had retired with a comfortable remuneration from the Austrian army. The house was also a supposed sanctuary for his exquisitely pretty, but orphaned niece, Laura. The General watched the girl and her dance partner as they twirled about the room. She dipped and bowed in the embrace of Carl Ebhardt. As the General looked on, the two young people danced, and he could barely conceal that he ached inside. It was a painful and yet bitterly true agony that affected him, for his heart burned for the love of the handsome young man. Ebhardt, dashingly attractive in his twenty-fifth year, was possessed of a smart mind to compliment his fine features. Having been appointed manager of the General's estates, Ebhardt had an immense responsibility. That the young man had come from a poor and disadvantaged family did not mean that he was silly. Upon entering the army at the fresh age of fifteen, as Corporal under the General Spielsdorf, he was soon in his commander's patronage.

Ebhardt proved quick to learn and willing to please. In an environment where there had been no women, Ebhardt's duties soon progressed from polishing the General's sabre to tending needs of a more personal nature. Yet Ebhardt did not seem to mind the older man's attentions, and he never felt as if he had been coerced into doing something that was not already in his nature. This of course pleased the General and as he spoiled the boy he began to treat his young flesh like a man treats a slave. Yet young Ebhardt was cool enough to manipulate his own needs and he had long ago figured that if the General wanted his love then the General would have to pay in kind. Over the next few years the bond between the two had become both tenacious and enigmatic. While in the service there had been no desperate need to keep their peculiar relationship too guarded a secret, for the General was not the first commander with a sexual appetite for young men, and neither would he be the last, but the relationship became predicated on something other, something that was not shared by either. Ebhardt had, over the past year, grown somewhat steely about the heart, because the world and fortune might seem to have abandoned him. As a younger man who knew few travails, at least not emotional ones, the way to the future was paved through the barter of the flesh, but as his body had developed and his face grew more beautiful, so did the desire to be free of this entanglement of invisible chains. Ebhardt had desired to become more self-sufficient and less dependent upon the General's money, but despite his canny senses and an aptitude for hard work, life and its pleasures always seemed to evaporate into air. He had begun in the service as Rekrut, and wanted to attain the rank of Feldmarschall Lieutenant, and although he had some little savings, they were not enough to purchase a farm or a business, for his military wage was extremely minimal. He did not wish to coerce money from the General, for although the thought of how easy that would be was ever in his mind, he found himself forced to admit that there may be little other course to profit his life. If the young man held a healthy reserve and was sceptical of a world that might judge too harshly if it discovered his past, he steadfastly denied any plotting or scheming. Recently Carl had been pondering his options and had yet to decide what he needed to do. He did not love the General, but he needed the man's patronage, and the time for making a start in the world was slipping away.

A few years back the General had retired. At the time, it had all been quite sudden and the reasons the older man gave were of a personal nature, but regarding them he did not elaborate. Carl had asked the General about his plans and the General had told him that he was retiring to his large country estate in the Duchy of Stiria. He had then implored the young man to come with him, but Carl had baulked at the idea. It was too soon for such a thing to happen just yet, and he didn't really want to commit to anything long term unless all other options were exhausted. The General went away disappointed, for he said there were reasons that he must go, reasons that he had not anticipated but reasons and responsibilities that nonetheless could not be avoided. In any case perhaps it was time to hang up his sword and live the quiet life.

Despite the General's departure the young man had continued in the service, yet that desire to be promoted proved elusive and it had become plainly obvious to Ebhardt that money talked, not ability. He thought he could prove worthy of higher rank, but unlike Ebhardt, the ranking officers above him were all the sons of money. Since the General had retired Ebhardt no longer had the man's support or his influence. Ebhardt's military career, despite his intellectual prowess, had thus stalled to a grinding halt. Eventually, after much pleading via five years of correspondence on the General's behalf, he had accepted the General's offer to manage his mentor's vast estates. Still, Carl skated on uncertain ground, ambivalent in his feelings and yoked by having limited financial opportunities outside of the General's interests. In frustration, that the world was forsaking him and that his years in the armed forces had amounted to desperately little, Ebhardt had made the only decision he thought that might work in his favour, and that was to pack up his worldly things and throw his lot in with his former patron.

It did not take long before he adapted to the new life in pastoral Stiria, and he brought to his position excellent practicality and was of an adept prowess for the demands of strenuous physical ability. The General was fond of Ebhardt and treated him like a squire, but a squire nonetheless who of course must fall into the old routine. For Ebhardt that hardly seemed of consolation, in fact it brought with it a strange degree of self-loathing that Ebhardt had not previously known. The General had, if anything, grown softer and perhaps more dependent, and the younger man had begun to wonder at his own mercenary motivations. The bond between the two was predicated into a trading of favours for monetary gain, and the General was no fool but a fool in love nonetheless. Ebhardt did not feel quite so strongly about the General's emotional needs, and because of this there had developed a peculiar but unavoidably growing distrust. If it were fidelity the General wanted then that was only there to a certain degree, as long as living was equitable, but Ebhardt had begun drifting away when the General's niece had become part of the bigger picture. It was no secret that Laura too had fallen in love with Ebhardt, that she had become besotted by the young man with the perfectly chiselled Roman nose and wavy jet-black hair. It was no secret either that Ebhardt returned the pretty girl's amative sentiment. This piqued the General because he could only think that Ebhardt was using his position to jokey his favour, and General Spielsdorf had not ever thought that his desires would become venal and squalid. In the fairy tale, one was supposed to live happily ever after. The military man put aside the fact that he had changed the tales moral stance somewhat, but who was really to judge when one was in love? General Spielsdorf did not feel comfortable or safe with the thought of promoting the relationship between the two young people, for it filled him with envy. He knew not what treacherous game Ebhardt was playing, but he was caught in a bind and he did not want to lose Ebhardt either. What would it take to compel Ebhardt permanently to his graces, marriage to his niece? That seemed a dreadful compromise, and foolish. At this juncture, it also presented a few deeper problems that made the General want to further question the depths of Ebhardt's motives. His first instinct was acrimony, and he told himself that he would refuse the union, but on those nights when the world was quiet and Ebhardt's smooth ivory skin was pressed against his own and they lay together under the lamp of a sterling moon, well, that was when both the flesh and resolve always weakened. Yet who took advantage of whom?

Although the General yearned to hear them, Ebhardt did not speak aloud the words that he would stay with the General until the day the General died, for that was a contract that both knew could never be committed to reality. With the onset of the General's sixty-fifth year came the fact that his own death might be a short ten years hence. If he did die then he died without issue and his estates would legally pass on to his niece. Marriage to the girl seemed less than the dread disaster it might have appeared under such a circumstance, and who was to say that throughout the anxieties and jealousies that would arise, that something of the intensity of love could not be made manifest? Had not Laura chosen a suitor who was capable in the way of the world and who made the General relatively at ease? She was ignorant to the ways of the world, and innocent, and she knew nothing of the world of men. Still, it held abstract ramifications for both the General and Ebhardt, and it made all love duplicitous and somehow dangerous. Yet this was perhaps half of the appeal for both entangled men, the skidding along the thin ice of emotion that proved too exciting to relinquish.

On the other hand, the General knew that should anything ever happen to him Laura would be well cared for and she would live a comfortable if rather estranged life. Though upon this point, the thought conjured up another, a thought that was almost unwelcome on this special night. Try as he might, the General could not stem the rather distracting notion that accompanied all this difficult truth- Laura was his ward and she was a poignant reminder of her lovely mother and her dear father, the General's younger brother, Helmut. Both Helmut and his wife, Dietlinde, had passed away tragically five years before in Bern, victims of a lethal but undetermined fever. The General had seemingly bowed to some peculiar code of honour and made the rather odd and abrupt decision to retire from the army to care for his brother's child. Perhaps, in the General's head, this event had precluded the opportunity to bind Carl forever and for always. In a remote setting his love would be ideal, and he could send Laura off to Vienna where she could learn all there was to learn about becoming a woman. Laura's general education was lacking and the General's plan, if all turned out well, was to send Laura to board in Simpson and Barton's fashionably new finishing school, there to learn the feminine expectations. Thus, the General would have the young man all to himself. The way looked gilded, as if it were the perfect proposition to finish one's weary days. When young Carl had accepted the General's invitation to attend his Stirian holdings, the General could not have been more pleased.

At the time, Laura had been a slender girl, one-month shy of her fifteenth birthday, and Spielsdorf was fully aware that Laura's life in this great house in the isolated provinces was often solitary and friendless, but she had everything provided for her comforts. Nevertheless, providing a nice home was not everything. The future was mapping itself out in all the correct ways, or so the General assumed, but despite his plans he had grievously misunderstood human nature. Laura was lonely and in her approaching womanhood she had begun showing vague signs of emotional despondency. Ebhardt's arrival at the estate seemed to have made all the difference in her demeanour, although the lack of honesty beneath the surface, that Ebhardt shared the General's bed was a secret betrayal that even naïve Laura did not appear to suspect. Nonetheless, General Spielsdorf reasoned that such duplicity was a small sacrifice to pay if it meant holding onto the object of desire. Most certainly he provided for Laura's welfare and soon her education, and he believed that he gave her affection too, a kindly love that she in return had grown to reciprocate and responded to as if the circumstances of her life had never been any different. Laura had grown radiant, and pretty, as is a picture, effervescent, with ruddy cheeks, her lips a perfect bow, her hair a cascade of yellow silk. She was, for the moment as bright as the celandine that the gardener had planted in the pots along the terrace. Still, she might have been the envy of all the girls of the neighbouring estates for they all wanted Carl, and tonight before all of them, he was hers. At her side was the most beautiful young man in the county, even though in her girlish immaturity she seemed ignorant that it was a bonding wrought of a lie.

Tonight, though was Laura's nineteenth birthday, and perhaps because womanhood was upon her and she would soon be of age, there was no time to suspect any impropriety from either uncle or lover but the need to secure that lover. Soon enough Laura would be off to Vienna for her education, a prospect that made her a little apprehensive, but never suspecting in her naivety that her road to learning was primarily a road to deliberate separation. That she would become engaged to Ebhardt and they would have intention to marry upon her return from the Capital was something that the General wished not to contemplate, and so, in his confused reasoning, he figured the romance would be long over by then. When this happened, such love would be consigned to the past, but the General was not truly confident about that. This relationship of three was too confusing. He had been foolish in not anticipating the female emotions. Spielsdorf had no guarantee that if the love reignited then the two young people would continue to live in his house, not that he wanted to advocate them joined in marriage under his roof. Yet the other dreadful possibility was that the lovers would move to another province, to another state or another country, perhaps as one as close as Liechtenstein or one as far away as England, and that made the General even more anxious. Perhaps he had overplayed his cards and misunderstood Ebhardt completely. Once upon a time money was power, and the attraction of having a wealthy patron was part of the reason that Ebhardt went willingly to the General's bed. Money controlled the young and inexperienced life, and it regulated what was offered and what was accepted. Nonetheless, how was one to think rationally when the stroke of lust was upon your skin, upon your lips, upon your thigh? When he kissed Ebhardt in the shadows his entire mind seemed to come undone, and when Ebhardt knelt submissively in the stables the stars seemed to burst. On the days that the General took Carl riding they would sometimes swim in the lake, and the water would glisten on Ebhardt's naked skin like jewels, like diamonds, and the General would press his quivering lips to the young man's chest and slack his burning thirst at the fountain of lust. The military man would feel that his senses were on fire, alight like the sun. Apollo consumed his flesh, and his flesh bathed in the handsome young man's corona, and the flame burned all the way to his core with the most divine of fires. Alas the General understood that he was indeed living in that dream and that dreams faded and vanished like the morning mist. Money might not always prove to be the tool that could wrest sexual power, and the General felt Ebhardt's heart was made of things much colder than anything the fire of lust could melt.

No, the General did not like entertaining the possibility that the young man might ever leave. That meant that all would be undone and the General would be alone, all his efforts to secure his heart's desire would come to nothing. He did not want to be alone in his big house with only his housekeeper for company. There, unto that fact, was the General caught in his own personal tragedy and he deliberated the twisted truth of his position and he did not like it at all. He did not want to think about being alone, about losing both surrogate son, lover and daughter, not now, that would spoil everything, and Laura was practically his own daughter, although what sort of peculiar analogy was that? Life sometimes was so most complicated when you gave into your heart. With a sigh and the shadow of a tired smile, General Spielsdorf tried to put aside the threat of a cheerless heart if only just for a moment. He needed to think about this soon and to arrive at a decision, but tonight was not the night. Had they been present this evening, Laura's parents would have been proud of the love and devotion the General had given the girl and they would have marvelled at the beauty they had brought into the world. That justified his control of Laura's life, at least in part, because the melancholy that had intruded into her days was quite suddenly dissipated. For the while the two of them might be able to share Ebhardt. It seemed possible but highly unlikely.

Guests from many neighbouring houses and visitors from far flung countries had come tonight to celebrate, to dance and be joyous, to drink sweet punch and eat chocolate layered torte and to wish Laura a happy birthday. There was a man in a turban and a woman in a sari and they talked in a most musical accent about the distant land of India where the Colonies had begun a wonderful trade in silks and spices. Enraptured, everyone listened in attendance and all were greatly entertained. Amid the laughter the General drifted along the length of his moorings, but his concerns were not what mattered, what really mattered tonight was that everyone be happy, for after all, birthdays came only once a year.

Laura and Carl turned and both smiled to the General as they whirled about the ballroom. Tonight, Laura was radiant, her blue eyes sparkling like jewels. Every time Carl brushed against her dress of lavender silk her heart skipped a little beat. Carl shared similar feelings for the young woman, despite his entanglement with her uncle. Carl did not understand, for it was all so strange, being attracted to both sexes demanded a subterfuge and a lie. This feeling for Laura was something new, this allure of female flesh. The General still thought of his niece as a prepubescent child and hardly as an adult woman, and Carl sometimes found himself trapped in his mentor's patriarchal sensibility. If Laura had been a child she was one no longer; that she had desires and emotions that might prove the equal of theirs was part of the thrill. Yes, she was pretty, and just as vivacious as her handsome young suitor, and Carl found himself drawn to her, closer and closer as the time passed, as the past four years were eclipsed, as the General receded like winter frost. Visions of the child were being replaced by visions of the sexually mature young woman. This blossoming beauty was something he could not help but now notice, and be attracted to, and yet as the relationship formed so did the idea that this was ultimately his fate. Kismet was a strange thing, for sometimes it presented destinies that were never considered. Having Laura meant having the General's estate, but that was the horribly superficial way the old man would look upon the union. Inside, that was not what drove Carl to the young woman's side. Laura quite excited him and in some strange way he might even be falling in love. Everything had become all so confusing. The land of her skin was a new domain to explore, one he looked forward to after a night of dreaming about it, but he could never confess to the General these emotions, the tangle would have become even more knotted and besides, both loves had their advantages.

With shimmering light glinting from her diamond and pearl tiara, with her blonde locks and her fresh, perfumed skin and her soft body held tight in his embrace, Carl thought quite arrogantly that he could have the best of both worlds and that the life of the disfavoured and destitute could be buried forever. General Spielsdorf blinked as they passed, capturing the frame of their glamour in his mind's eye. The couple receded and a dozen others whirled by and the General looked toward the ballroom entrance. There he saw a pretty young woman hurrying from the cloakroom, donning a flimsy travelling cloak about her shoulders and tying its cords in a hasty knot about her slender throat. Laura and Carl, approaching again in their loop, stopped dancing and Laura smiled sweetly, letting go of his hand. He looked ever so disappointed, his lips parting slightly as if to protest their temporary division. 'Forgive me' her expression seemed to say as she drew away from him, turning and picking up her skirts and exposing her silk stockings, and hurrying to join her uncle on the steps. They came up to a lovely young woman and a middle-aged man who wore a short silver-grey cloak.

'Miss Emma,' began General Spielsdorf, 'do you have to leave us so soon?'

The girl's cheeks dimpled as she smiled and apologised. 'I'm afraid so.'

The General reached forward and took her slim hand, a hand almost as white as the gloves he wore, and kissed it gently.

'Never mind,' he said, turning to Laura, and his words were as much a reassurance to her as they were for Emma, 'there will be another time.'

The middle-aged man standing beside the girl shook General Spielsdorf's hand in departure.

'Mr. Morton,' said the older man, 'so sorry that you have to go.'

'General,' replied Morton in his clipped English accent, adjusting the white silk cravat about his neck, 'it has been a delightful party.'

'I am so glad that you've enjoyed it.'

Emma Morton beamed happily and kissed Laura on the cheek. 'Thank you, Laura, it was a lovely party, and…' Pausing, with the light making emerald brilliants in her own pretty tiara, looking like the princess of a fairy tale who must leave the ball and her prince before the stroke of midnight, she lowered her voice to a whisper. The corners of her lovely cupid's mouth drew up in an arc. 'I think Carl's very handsome.'

From the moment, she had cast her eye on Ebhardt Emma Morton had felt a little twinge of envy pull at her heart. He had aroused a deep longing that she dared not admit, especially not to her friend Laura, and she felt as much guilt because her attraction to Carl had been so sudden. Why, she didn't even know the young man, but he had thick and wavy curls of black hair, the face of a Roman hero, and a strong muscular body. Emma told herself that it was no sin to look, but it brought something else into her mind that she had rather not think about, a novel that she had read but could not forget. That forbidden novel was her secret, and if the thought of having read a disallowed book made her blush now, she was looking upon the pretty face of her best friend and she was indeed blushing too. Laura's cheeks had turned a pale shade of cherry. The girl glanced at her uncle but the General did not notice. There had been so little time this day to tell Emma all the details about her whirlwind engagement, how she had loved Carl for such a long time and how that love had never been truly possible until now. It was a cruel misfortune that Emma lived so many kilometres away and that they did not see each other more often.

'Oh, must you go Emma?' Laura protested weakly. 'It's so early!'

'We have a long journey home,' Morton interjected gently, turning to the General's niece and smiling. He understood perfectly the pretty girl's disappointment, and his own daughter's for that matter, but it could not be helped. 'Very happy birthday,' he wished the young woman, by way of consolation, and as he spoke he leaned forward, taking Laura's hand in his and kissing it as he bowed, 'and remember, you're coming to stay with Emma very soon.'

The Morton's were expatriate English and it was the gentleman's astute ways in the matters of finance that had been a major factor in their relocation to Stiria. British born and bred, Morton had made something of a fortune by investing in the maritime trade, importing goods and spices from distant and exotic places like Asia and Northeast Africa, and bartering them throughout England and Europe. With the profits from this traffic and with his affluence increasing by way of judicious business contacts in Vienna, Morton had purchased a large manor house in the Stirian Duchy. The residence Mr. Morton had purchased, though spacious, was but a fraction of the size of General Spielsdorf's expansive holdings, but it was large enough for large rooms to soon swell with a profound emptiness, an emptiness haunted by tragedy. This remote setting was hardly the place for a young woman to exist without motherly love or the society of others her own age. An unfortunate circumstance was to be found at the core of the Morton's relocation, one that was now not talked about, for it involved a personal calamity. Morton's wife had deceased a few months before the move from his beloved northern England. His only daughter, Emma, was stricken with a bitter, but understandable grief, though it was agreed that a reasonable time for mourning had elapsed. However, yearning for the deceased parent and a nostalgia for England and home caused Emma pain and sadness and lamentation.

Mr. Morton, who must spend extended periods away from home, at length recognised his maternal oversights, and to ease the transition from England to the new life, and to keep Emma's mind from becoming morbid, had recently engaged a Governess for the girl's tuition. Mademoiselle Perrodon, who was barely ten years' Emma's senior, could not quite fill the role of mother. Although she was attractive and amenable, and professional in her application and friendly upon acquaintance, the French woman had begun falteringly in her relationship with her student. Emma did not respond to the tales of Mademoiselle Perrodon's own town in rural France, a community as lovely as a postcard, where they grew excellent wine and made lovely clothing. Although Emma tried to reciprocate interest she found herself quickly slipping into apathy and was beginning to take an odd dislike to her new Governess. Mademoiselle, sensing the gap between them widening, had begun to form a thinly concealed attitude of judgment against her charge. This attitude, one that thought Emma simpered and pretended, made her believe that everyone was dotting upon a malingerer. She understood Emma's loss but she also understood that Emma was young and pretty. Mademoiselle was still pretty, but youth was slipping away, and when you were young and pretty one's prospects in the world were much improved. This idea seemed unfair in the light of Emma's circumstances, but Emma sensed the draft of emotional coldness that blew from Mademoiselles core and although she half understood that chill, it only made her more inclined to be uncooperative. It had only been recently, with the advent of Laura Spielsdorf's friendship, that Emma had begun to shine again.

For a short while it had all appeared as if things had been progressing well for Emma, who seemed to adjust slowly with both loss of mother and home, and living in a big house in the romantic heart of Mittleland Europe promised a quiet life in which to recuperate from grief. In the beginning, it was everything she told herself it could be; an adventure and a new life, with dreamlike notions of a fairy tale to wish her days away and take her mind from brooding over the death of her mother. However, Stiria only saw the pretty girl becoming a prisoner to isolation and as detached in her existence as is a single rose fading in a single crystal bud vase. Emma realised this fact quite quickly, for she was not as vacuous and silly as they all thought her, and she saw the same patriarchal process dictating Mademoiselle Perrodon's existence too, but there was nothing she could do to change the way of the world. To close that world down she took to solitary walks and rides in the forests abounding her father's newly acquired land. She found herself haunting the parks and the gardens, visiting the broken phallus that was the crumbling, ivy-strangled bell tower of a nearby desacralized church; always alone in a landscape of green woods and blue skies, but nonetheless, grey days. Such activity shut the demands of the world out for hours at a time and let her mind a little peace, relieving her momentarily from lachrymation and the prosaic regime of lessons. If they were not nagging her to look pretty they were scolding her for not trying to learn German or to play the piano. These dull expectations made Emma miserable and uncooperative. After a while, with only the Governess and the house servants for company and her father absent for many weeks on end, Emma always found herself pining again for her home forsaken.

Despite the company of the new Governess, Emma became fretful and lonely and this progressed rapidly into a state of unspoken rebellion. She refused to eat her food and ignored her education. There was little that could enliven Emma, for it was boring and useless reading turgid expositions that inspired nothing short of tedium. She did not enjoy scouring Sarah Austin's translations from the Austrian into English because she did not feel the joy in application. She preferred to be read to rather than to read herself, a childish leftover wish fulfillment from her maternal loss no doubt, and she baulked at learning the coarse German dialect which made it difficult for her to communicate with the household. Try as she might her lips and tongue failed to make the sounds and she was reprimanded constantly for being intellectually lazy. She spent a little of her free time, when not riding in the forest, opening and yet hardly reading the romance novels that came in crates from England. These books always formed part of a shipment of tomes that boosted her father's library, and that library was meant to impress the local gentry and visitors to their manor rather than fill her slow hours with entertainment or education. They were books of history and books of science, books about the natural world and religion, and books in various foreign languages. No doubt it was hoped that she would eventually read them all. None of them were of much interest, even the novels that were intended for her own consumption, tales by the likes of Joan Aiken and Valerie Anand seemed trite. The truth was that no one ever asked her what she might have liked to read; but what did that matter? Admittedly, some of the stories sparked interest, but it would have been so much nicer if she had known the company of a friend with whom she could discuss the hero and the heroine of the tales and to laugh at and yearn for a similar adventure. Laura Spielsdorf was going to be that person and Emma felt this truth. That she had a wonderful friend now filled her with a great swell of happiness.

One day, some months ago, several boxes of luxury goods had arrived from England. They were filled with exotic materials and teas and spices, laces, curios and books bundled together from Mr. Morton's expanding trade routes. The arrival of these crates had caused Emma some excitement and then had sparked her curiosity. From the packing straw, she had pulled an extraordinarily intricate ivory carving. It was of a boat, quite large, over a foot long, all white and pristine, sculptured with the most amazing filigree work. Why, there were even miniature ladies on the upper deck, and they were playing tiny musical instruments and beckoning with tiny ivory hands. Emma marvelled at the beautifully rendered ship. To her innocent eye it was so lovely, and as she gazed upon it for a long moment she was transported to the far eastern land of China, dressed in silk and waving from that gleaming, polished boat deck. With a disparaged sigh, she had placed the boat on the floor at her knees, for she had resigned herself to the notion that such a thing was never to happen in her life. Deeper she had rummaged into the crate. There she had found another treasure, a book that bore no author's moniker. Its title 'The Lustful Turk, or Lascivious Scenes from a Harem' drew her immediate attention. The title alone seemed to deliberate, rather sensationally, upon erotic encounters and of loves that were beyond Emma's sensitive, youthful comprehension. It was not a title that conjured a dry treatise, not like Sarah Austin's 'State of Public Instruction in Prussia', far from it! Now, here was something different, something Emma instinctively understood was forbidden the eyes of a young and impressionable lady. Opening the volume, the first paragraph read:

'Scenes in the Harem of an Eastern Potentate faithfully and vividly depicting in a series of letters from a young and beautiful English lady to her friend in England the full particulars of her ravishment and of her complete abandonment to all the salacious tastes of the Turks.'

Emma had gasped upon reading that first paragraph, and she had quickly cast a furtive eye over her shoulder and about the room lest she be suddenly discovered. Her curiosity was at once overwhelmed and she had given the inside pages a quick glance and her eyes had opened even wider, and she thought they would pop from her head at the lurid descriptions upon which they fell and the crudely drawn illustrations. Objectionable words almost leapt off the page, and there were graphic details of the male member and of secret female places of which young Emma had been in blissful ignorance.

'I was stripped in an instant by the eunuchs of every particle of my dress; they even untied the fillets which fastened up my hair; then, having reduced me to a complete state of nature, they retired, taking away my clothes.'

'Oh, my goodness!' Emma declared, and her hands holding the book had begun to tremble. She flipped rapidly through a few more pages.

'...so largely is he proportioned that his efforts were at first without effect. Again, he attempted...and making a desperate lunge, his arrow, instead of piercing where he intended it should, slipped into the shrine of Venus...'

Emma grimaced with disgust, but she had to read more. Rapidly she doubled-back through the pages:

'Raising myself from my stooping position, I extended her thighs to the utmost, and placed myself standing between them, then letting loose my rod of Aaron, which was no sooner at liberty but it flew up with the same impetuosity with which a tree straightens itself when the cord that keeps it bent towards the ground comes to be cut, with my right hand I directed it towards the pouting slit so that the head was soon in...I thrust, I entered. Another thrust buried it deeper... Another shove caused her to sigh deliciously—another push made our junction complete.'

Oh, it was totally disgusting! Knowing that she could not leave the book out, Emma had tucked it into a pocket in her dress, whispering to herself a secret vow to pursue its contents more fully at a more private convenience. When she did get to read it, she was both appalled and enthralled. The tome contained many vivid descriptions of fornication and connexion of a most sinful nature; of the seduction of a travelling English girl called Emily, by pirates, who was deposited in a slave market and harem. The acts poor Emily was made to perform were most disgusting, and one in which the nasty Ali thrust his member into her behind was as vulgar and sensational as nothing poor innocent Emma Morton could previously have imagined. Why, she had never, ever seen a man's private parts, let alone imagine them getting hard and long and thrust into a woman's body! There were other things too that caused her mind to spin, descriptions of the lash and oral stimulations. That the seductions were aligned with submission and whipping, themes that were equally as strange and forbidden to Emma as was the imaging of a male sex, left her gasping in horror. She had read passages of a woman's rape and her resultant desire for an exotic Oriental. It was positively scandalous. Rape equalled force, and how could one love someone who had forced you to...

The ensuing pages were just as colourful in detailing various other erotic pursuits, as detailed as they were unnatural, and Emma Morton had been repeatedly shocked by the seemingly endless litany of acts of shameless carnality.

The discovery of this book had changed Emma's innocent perspectives of life. That the body might find no limit in its search for gratification, even to the horrible extreme of forced rape and genital mutilation, a deed Emma had never even entertained might be performed on another person let alone endured, was terrifying and yet seductive. Surely the tale had been included in Mr. Morton's shipment by mistake, for it did not seem that it was fit for any respectable publication. Worse, were the illustrations, images that made poor, virtuous Emma blush with shame. The depictions of intense passions and base desires were accompanied by etchings of intimately compromising sexual positions and vices that seemed impossible. Some of these positions appeared positively ridiculous in their execution and one would most certainly have to have practiced the gymnastic art to have achieved their effect. The graphics were positively depraved and reprehensible, and their fleshy edacity only further ensured Emma's confusion, that sex was lurid and dangerous and yet nevertheless exciting. The more of the story that she read, the more Emma found herself only half able to distinguish between what was love and what was lust.

No doubt the book had been commissioned for a private readership; perhaps a Hellfire Club or fetish institution in which common decency was not counted upon. Of course, there was always the notion that her father had full knowledge of the book and had hoped to intercept its arrival before the contents of the crate were distributed into his household. Although how could that be true? That thought horrified the young woman even more. No, it had to have been a shipping error; this crate had been delivered to this estate by mistake. It was too debauched and foul to think of her kind and gentle father being entertained by such corrupt literature! Yet such was the paradox of 'The Lustful Turk', for its litany of indecent and gross acts of carnality were indeed explicit and shocking, both in its description and its coarse language and it lured her back to its pages time and again. Nonetheless, the words, those filthy words, why reading them, pronouncing them aloud, well, that was tantamount to blaspheming! If her father were to gain knowledge of her possession of the thing, Emma did not know for certain what his reaction would be. Emma's childhood innocence was at that moment changed irrevocably in the passing of one sunny morning. She had nevertheless hidden the book in a secret place, wrapped in a silk scarf and tied to the bottom of a drawer in her bedroom dresser. That drawer she locked with a little brass key, and that key she hid among the glass-paste tiaras in a green velvet-lined box of costume jewelry. She could take no chance that it might be discovered and read by Mademoiselle Perrodon, by one of the maids, if indeed pretty Gretchin could even read English, or even by the butler Mr. Renton. Because Mademoiselle Perrodon spoke German and French fluently she would have had no difficulty translating any paragraphs that Emma could not, though the English alone was prurient enough! What would her tutor think or what would she do!

One afternoon, not long after this incident, when walking with Mademoiselle Perrodon by the ornamental lake by the great oak tree not far from the house, Emma had decided to ask of her Governess about the nature of sex. How she was to broach this subject with tact she did not know, but 'The Lustful Turk or Lascivious Scenes from a Harem' had awoken a deep sense of curiosity that she knew her father could never explain. Why, he didn't even realise that she was now a young woman and had long ago ceased to be a little girl. Emma pondered the appropriate words to begin her query, and when she did ask Mademoiselle Perrodon, the woman had coloured with embarrassment. The Governess had replied that men were odd creatures, rough in their needs and generally disagreeable. It was most certainly not the response Emma had anticipated. Perhaps Mademoiselle herself was just as inexperienced in such things, or alternatively knew more than she could comfortably relate. An awkward silence had fallen between them after this, and as they approached the house the sun was setting. In the glow of the dying star the waters of the ornamental lake became scarlet. The stone walls of the house became a reflection in fire, writhing in the rheum, and as Emma looked away from her older companion and up to a window, she imagined that she fleetingly saw her dear mother standing in the aperture. Emma was about to call out a greeting, but the words caught in her throat as she watched her mother falling, leaping into the air to fall into the red waters below. Emma had screamed and fainted upon the spot.

As positively horrific as the vision had been, inspired no less by the heady concoction of questionable literature she had been reading and her questioning of Mademoiselle Perrodon, the young woman spent the next two weeks in a fever. In her illness, she was visited by the mysteriously tragic figure of her suicidal mother, who spoke not, but stood silently at the foot of her bed, bleeding from slit wrists. The blood, upon one visitation had flooded the sheets, and Emma had screamed until she had been forcibly restrained. Suicide, of course, is not a pretty word, and the truth of Mrs. Morton's death was something that should never talked about or resolved, nor could its effect on young Emma's mind ever be erased. The visions had proved too much and Emma had cried for many weeks, wishing in her heart that she could return to her Cumberland birthplace. At home, she had taken similar walks with her deceased parent and known at least an idea of youthful contentment and happiness. Her immature mind knew not the circumstances that had caused her mother to take her own life, and that alone was a most grievous sin. Suicide was a sleight against God, and it was too difficult a pain to reconcile, and now Emma Morton was sadly the possessor of a heart filled with misery. What made things worse was the fact that she no longer felt like a child, but had become aware of her own body, and of the allure of the flesh. Mixed up with this new awakening came the unwanted and irrational fear of guilt torn from the pages of the Turk.

Yet the truth was that Emma was stainless and a virgin and that she knew positively nothing of her own biological catalyst. On the verge of a melancholic onset Emma had thrown herself upon the Governess and plead that the woman must speak to her father to send her back to England. As fate would have it, the next day, arriving by the morning post, a chance invitation from the General Spielsdorf who lived twenty kilometres to the south had led to an introduction to the gentleman's niece, Laura. Since Laura had lost her mother many years before, the two girls shared each a similar sympathy, and a genuine and close friendship had resulted in the meeting. It had been enough to inspire in Emma a fresh desire for living, and her demeanour soon improved with the prospects of the new friendship. After this party Laura would visit Emma, and yes indeed, there would be so much more to talk about. They would discuss so many things, so many things about love. Emma even briefly wondered if she might ultimately confide in Laura about 'The Lustful Turk'. Well, soon enough she would make that decision. Right now, and trying not to blush further, Emma's smile dimpled her cheeks and she almost beamed, nodding and only half-suppressing a positive gasp of joy.

'Yes,' said Mr. Morton to Laura. 'You're coming to stay with us.'

'I'm looking forward to it, Mr. Morton,' returned Laura, grasping Emma's hand in her own clasp and smiling just as broadly. The only thing that would not be good would be that she should miss her beau, Carl, for the duration of her visit.

'General,' said Morton by way of goodbye and he intimated to his daughter that the time had come to depart.

'Auf weidersehen' returned the General, bowing in respect as he spoke.

'Goodbye,' said Emma, thinking that she should have replied in German, but what did it matter? She was happy and sad, reluctant to go and yet thrilled that her friend was coming to stay. Emma shrugged the drape of her travelling cloak over her shoulders and walked with her father towards the door. She did not look back. General Spielsdorf nodded his final farewell and as Laura watched them go she gave a little wave, her hand rising to the pretty silken rose nestled in her bosom, but Emma did not see. She was sad that her friend had departed, just when the party had only begun, but Ebhardt was still here, watching patiently from the edge of the dance floor, waiting and smiling for her to re-join him. Quickly Laura ran down the steps and back into his arms, but even as they took fleet step the music ceased and the dance was over. Ignorant that the cessation of the music foretold a prophecy, the two young people broke into laughter, and Laura curtsied and Carl bowed and they both applauded each other. The General stared at them, his brow creased and his smile fading. From their coach window Emma Morton watched General Spielsdorf's great house retreat into the shadows.

She regretted that she had barely had a day alone with Laura, and that now it would be hours before she slept in her own bed, weeks even before Laura came to stay, and Emma sighed. Though she told herself she would dream sweet dreams this night and dream them way beyond the dawn, Emma fantasised that she would have a young man in her dreams, just like Ebhardt, and he would kiss her and spoil her and love her until death. As the carriage swayed and rocked along its way the night without grew chillier, wisps of breath streamed from the horse's nostrils, the spokes whirled and the lamps flickered. The coach driver, glad to be on his journey did not goad his team, but instead kept a steady pace, heading west, knowing that at this hour care needed to be taken on the road for the sun would not rise at their backs for some hours yet. The coachman hoped to be home long before the sun rose. From out of the dark a black coach pulled by two black steeds sped recklessly toward them on the road, moving toward the direction of General Spielsdorf's house. Its lamps were aureate and dancing in the night. The coach driver tipped his hat to the other coachman as he went by but no such courtesy was returned, only the swirl and rush of the winds of haste. The carriage passed them and disappeared in a cloud of sable dust. Inside the Morton coach, Emma slipped down into a strange sleep, her pretty head upon a velvet cushion, lulled by the revolution of the wheels and the steady clopping of hoof-beats. She dreamed of Laura and Carl, and she dreamed she watched them as they were making love on satin cushions, under a gilded dome in the exotic city of Constantinople. As she slept her father watched over, looking at her intently with his eyes glittering like chips of blue glass.

Conrad sprang quickly down the marble stair to greet the carriage as it drove up the raked way to the house entrance. He positioned himself at attention and held aloft a lighted lamp indicating to the driver the spot that he should rein his horses to a halt. The coach was manned by a postilion and two footmen along with the driver, and as it pulled to a stop an ostler from the stables came forward and took the harness, stroking one of the steed's glittering black manes. The horses remained stock still, their breath white mist in the air. Conrad came forward with his lamp and before its gilded beam the shadows slid upon the blue dark surface of the coach window, illuminating a solid shape moving behind the glass. A footman at the rear jumped down and came around to the side of the carriage, unfolding the steps quickly and opening the door. Just as quickly he stepped aside and bowed low. Once the door was open a figure emerged from the conveyance, a figure draped from head to toe in jet, entirely covered so that not one feature was made distinct. This figure was followed by another in a mantle of midnight blue, and led by the doorman they proceeded inside where they peeled away their darkling mantles and entered the ballroom.

In the ballroom, the music had momentarily ceased and that was only because a violin had snapped a string and the player was busy fitting another. The piano player was shuffling through his sheet music, looking for something a little subdued after the lively trip of the previous tune and as he rifled he glanced up. Across the vast room he saw a new arrival. The vision he beheld was of a mature but handsome woman who was dressed in black, and from bosom to hem, running in two vines down the middle of her gown, a Grecian golden leaf pattern glittered on golden woven stem. In her tightly bound black locks were pinned white gardenias of hand sewn silk. The woman looked about the room, her glance sweeping the auditorium and silencing everyone in its wake. Regally, she raised a slim hand to her shoulder and tilted her noble head. All tongues in the room had stopped their social chatting and all eyes were now fixed upon the new guest. However, this moment was only fleeting, for those same eyes were suddenly diverted away from the woman in black and directed upon a younger woman. This girl had languidly stepped from behind the other, to stand at her side. The piano player cleared his throat, and the double bass player stretched up to cast his eyes over the violin player's shoulder, his glance spearing across the partying crowd. A second violinist tapped his bow upon the music stand of the first. Finishing the repair to his string the man looked up and his gaze, like the gaze of everyone else in that room, fixed itself upon the young woman dressed in scarlet.

This young woman could have been no older than twenty-two or twenty-three years, and she was of medium height although she stood tall and proud like someone of royal bearing. This stance made her appear taller than she was, and her scarlet gown's low-cut bosom was far more revealing than any dress worn by any girl in the room. It accentuated quite boldly the complete curve of both form and breasts. The shadow of rosy nipples and every bodily curve could be glimpsed beneath the sheer fabric, even from across the room. The vision of both dress and flesh made the throat of every man in that room, young and old, run dry and rendered the women speechless through the sheer audacity of the spectacle. Yet the girl held her head high in confidence, and seemed not to notice the mutters of disapproval and the wave of controversy that rippled through General Spielsdorf's guests. The red of that dress was so intense that it appeared the girl stood in a pillar of flame, and the same fire licked the jewels in the slender crown she wore in her flowing auburn hair and threw scintillates through her thick auburn locks. The fire also glimmered and flared in a spectacular ruby that nestled between those high and lovely breasts. It was a stone in which burned the light of the Großer Wagen, unearthly and celestial and glowing eternal, resembling a fat droplet of blood. The young woman's skin glowed too, the colour of a translucent pearl, and her lips were full and glistened moistly with a deep rose sheen; her eyes dazzled, blue like sapphires.

Three young men stood at the far side of the ballroom, all held in friendly conversation with General Spielsdorf. Two of them were attired in the military insignia of the rank of corporal and the General could not but help think how handsome they looked with their fresh young faces cleanly shaved, their eyes bright, their buckles and medals glinting like golden stars. One of the youths, Kurt, was the son of the local innkeeper, Kurt the elder. Younger Kurt's father had saved and invested for many years so that the young man might do well from a military career. Kurt the younger was telling of the latest gossip he had gleaned from a visit with his father, but the General had no interest in the elder Kurt's affairs, and instead inquired after the latest developments within the Service. Because Kurt the Younger had been recently stationed in Paris, they turned their conversation to the political clime in France. Their talk drifted into what had happened during the years of the revolution, some thirty years previously, a time General Spielsdorf recalled all too clearly. Insurrection and torture had led to a terrible and bloody business that had seen the heads of many roll beneath the Lady Guillotine. The horror had even reached as far as the Austrian provinces. The nobility and the gentry had fallen like flies, their severed necks spewing blood to appease the peasant revolt. The ugliness of it all, the horror and the bloodshed of war was hardly an unfamiliar theme for General Spielsdorf, but what concerned him most was that the bloodshed could ever begin again and truly spill over into Germany.

Of course, the terror that had erupted in Paris was now in the past, but that city was at the heart of a country that was topographically not so far away. Although the General had not been in France during the terror of those years, he remained cautious. General Spielsdorf sighed for he held Paris in such little esteem. He did not like Paris, its politics nor its filth. All of that disagreed with him, and limited his need to visit France since those troubled times. He was much younger then, yet still his recollections of the city were sour. He knew its opulence and its decadence and had walked within its gilded palaces where the halls were spattered in excrement and piss. He had seen the tide of prostitutes and thieves in the grimy streets and he had hated the poverty and the desperation. The pestilential capital was so disgusting that the people even ate snails and the legs of frogs, and partook of other unnamable and sickening gastronomy. The men were crude and the women were shamelessly brazen. Paris culture could scarcely have changed much in the prevailing years and the General entertained no desire to ever partake of its tarnished glamour again. If ever he did return, then God hope that he went with genuine purpose. Still, he could not so easily shake off the past and his anxieties were not ill founded, for Germany was no friend of France. Should the carnage of that Revolution ever erupt again despite these relatively peaceful intervening years, and infiltrate into Stiria, it would certainly touch its black hand upon all their lives.

The General hated to be so pessimistic but he was not unwise to think that he should be prepared if any such calamity should ever happen again. The land of unreason knew not compromise and the hatred between France and Germany could have considerable and detrimental consequences if such a catastrophe were again allowed to happen. Wars always left you wounded one way or another. This caused the General an involuntary shudder, and he briefly remembered an old friend, the Baron von Hartog, whom he had met in service. For one odd moment, he wondered what the Baron was doing this day, but soon the thought evaporated. For the moment, all was peaceful and he had no real need to be paranoid and to worry. As he listened to the details of the young men's eager report, the General's interest began to fade. It was becoming difficult to focus on the moment when your heart was tortured by a fruitless romantic ideal. Despite this inner turmoil, perhaps it was fated that Carl and Laura should marry and go abroad for their own future safety. The General hurt in his soul as he conjured the idea of that grim and unpleasant prospect, however he told himself to stop thinking these glum thoughts and abruptly quelled his misery. Tonight, he reminded himself, he should leave military matters and politics to the behest of superior others. If any such calamity should come then so be it, but not tonight. Such talk was not the ideal subject for a young woman's birthday party and for goodness sake, he was retired after all, was he not? Besides, he had other concerns much closer to home.

He turned slightly and faced away from the young men and stared solemnly across the ballroom, taking a sip of sweet punch. The third young man, a handsome fellow dressed in olive-green velvet stood off to the General's right. He too was bored, for the latest military news concerning matters of war and battle inspired little interest. He preferred his engagements to be with those of the fairer sex and he had some time ago learned that his boyish charms and a flattering tongue were the best of all weapons when it came to matters of love. In the moment that he glanced away from his fellow company his eye fell upon the girl in crimson. The young man could only stare. When his companions both looked up all three of them also found their tongues stilled and their vision beguiled.

It was the young man on the right who broke the frozen tableau with a broad smile, and the General, perceiving an electric change in the atmosphere lowered the crystal goblet from his lips and fixed his eyes on the newcomers. Across the room, posed below a towering Mengus reproduction, 'Perseus and Andromeda', a detail that dominated the ballroom entrance, two women stood looking directly at General Spielsdorf. In any other circumstance, the painting should have dwarfed and engulfed the two women in its spectacle, but the eye was not held by the panoramic grandeur of the exaggerated mythological scene but rather by their extreme and startling physicality. Beautiful Andromeda, chained to the rock in the ether above their heads paled in comparison to the young girl in red.

'Excuse me, gentlemen,' said the General, quickly swallowing the last of his punch and then handing his glass to a servant holding a gadrooned silver tray.

All the young men were too busy staring that they failed to respond. Gracefully the General strode across the room to greet his new guests, the older woman opening her arms wide as he approached, her teeth shining like pearls as she smiled. The General took her hand.

'My dear Countess,' he said, 'I am honoured.' Bowing forward he kissed her hand.

'So charming of you to invite us,' the Countess replied, taking back her hand and placing it upon her bosom where it fluttered like a pale butterfly above her heart. Light danced from the emerald droplets depending from her ears, and as she smiled she blinked slowly, turning slightly to the girl at her side.

'May I present my…' the Countess paused for the briefest of moments, placing an almost unspoken emphasis upon her words before continuing, 'my daughter, Marcilla?'

Marcilla lowered her long and curling black eyelashes and the corners of her red velvet lips rose in a faint curve. She gently nodded. The girl's understated expression was enough to make General Spielsdorf click his heels together and stand to attention, but there was something else in her expression, something hidden and secret and knowing, something that he instantly sensed and did not like, and he did not know why. The young woman gave off an aura of predatory confidence which, in polite society, was not how a young woman should be, and it was an attitude clearly advocated by her mother.

'Who's that?' The young man in the green coat asked of his two companions, but only the young soldier in the middle made scant reply, his words automatically leaving his lips while his eyes continued to devour the vision of beauty on the other side of the ballroom.

'I've heard that they've just moved in to that place about five kilometres away, you know, where the old Baroness used to live.'

Asked the young soldier Kurt: 'The Baroness Meinster?'

'That's the place!' replied the first.

A look of troubled concern passed over Kurt's face, even as he young men all shared a look of genuine surprise. That place had a rather colourful reputation attached to it, a reputation that had grown up over the years along with the thorns and the weeds. Kurt's father was a most superstitious man, and he disliked the nobility, and he had often remarked that the nobility belonged to a Feudal Stiria that sucked the life's blood from the poor. Kurt the elder attested that demons had lurked in the gloomy depths of the Baroness Meinster's soul. That woman was what the superstition-ridden Stirian provinces called 'Ordög', a witch. Younger Kurt gave less weight to the tales of old, for his father's family had experienced the Baroness's kind before, but such stories should have dispersed in the hoarfrost of night. Perhaps these new bloods who now resided in the Baroness's house would bring the place back to life, perhaps there would be more invitations to gala balls within its rooms, dances for young men to attend and new friendships with beautiful young ladies to pursue. The young man in green certainly hoped for one friendship, and had eyes for only one lady in the room. In his mind's eye, it wasn't simply a kiss the young man in olive velvet coveted, but the pulchritudinous excitement of imaging that young woman's lips upon his sex. Self-consciously he quickly checked his coat front to assure that it was buttoned up all the way down. Happy that he was not presenting obviously, and flashing his best smile, he stood tall and puffed up his esteem like a strutting peacock. Reaching up he straightened his lapels and lowering his voice a further octave as he preened, he spoke quickly even as he moved away.

'Well,' he told his fellows, 'we must love our neighbor's, Kurt.'

Without further ado, he was briskly gone from their company and almost sprinted across the room.

Marcilla looked upon the General and she gave a strange smile, and the General sensed his heart suddenly tripping faster. He felt like a child caught out telling an untruth and it was most uncomfortable. In that cobalt glance, there was understatement and it drew up a secret line between the military man and the lovely young Countess. General Spielsdorf shook the feeling off by returning his attention to the girl's mother.

'Will you dance?' asked the General, offering his arm to the Countess.

'Oh, enchanted,' she replied and taking him by the hand they moved to the dance. How smooth and soft were those hands, rubbed with perfumed pomade, and the General led her away from the beautiful nymph in scarlet gown and down the steps onto the glittering ballroom floor.

The little orchestra struck up a new tune. The General was glad to set a space between him and the girl dressed in red, although unsettled he couldn't quite figure the notion why. She kept looking at him and smiling an enigmatic smile that was most disturbing. The General swept the older woman into the waltz and turned his back on the Countess' daughter. Yet even in that motion he felt as if the girl's sight were boring a hole into the back of his head. At length, after turning many a dizzying spiral through the whirl of dancers, the General lost sight of Marcilla. As the party guests began to find their voices again a gaggle of young men had swarmed about the girl in the red dress. The lad in the green coat stepped up and claimed his prize, all the other young men shook their heads in disappointment and defeat and dispersed with little but hope in their hearts that their turn to dance with the beautiful new guest would come soon. Risking a quick glance back in Marcilla's direction the General was relieved to notice that her attention had been diverted from his person, that she was now the interest of a pretty young boy, and he gave a thankful sigh. Each couple whirled to a sedate waltz and Carl and Laura pressed each other close and then separated to arm's length. Laura twirled and moved in close to her beau again.

'Carl,' whispered Laura as she drew her sweet lips up to his handsome cheek, 'I do love you.'

Even as she said the words he thought them strange because part of his heart really didn't believe the words. Somewhere buried under all the expected artifice was a grim spark of confusion. A brief wave of incomprehension passed over Ebhardt's face and he feigned an inscrutable smile. She told herself that she liked to hear him say it aloud, that he loved her, even though he seemed rather stoic when pressed upon the subject of open declaration.

'What?' Carl questioned, slightly flustered.

Of course, he believed that Laura loved him, but he also reckoned that she was immature and that she did not understand a great deal about why people were drawn to each other. To understand that required that she must somehow find out the truth. There was no doubt to be entertained upon that fact- it must never happen. Naturally, she was teasing him, that's what it was. As they danced, Ebhardt considered her pretty face and he saw that her eyes were elsewhere, glancing over his shoulder. Swinging her around Carl too saw just what it was that had taken Laura's attention, or rather who.

'Every other young man in the room is staring at that girl over there,' she told him, not taking her eyes from Marcilla. 'All, except you.' Laura's voice trailed away abruptly, for the girl in scarlet wavered in her vision like a flame, her body vibrant and confident so that Laura's thoughts became hazy and unreal.

Carl's noted the sudden change, and his lips gave an involuntary twitch. He turned and focused his attention upon the beautiful stranger whose eyes were fixed in their direction. Marcilla's gaze was intent, unwavering, and under its intent it made Laura feel quite strange.

'I do believe she'd like to take you away from me,' said Laura, and although it sounded ridiculous or that she might be jealous, Laura herself could not help but admire Marcilla's physical charms. 'She keeps staring at you.'

The dancers spun through another revolution and then another, a palette of colours splashed upon a ballroom floor that was now astir with the most intense shade of scarlet fire. Every other young woman within a foot of that flame burned mercilessly into cinders and expired. Ebhardt risked another look in Marcilla's direction. The girl was incredibly beautiful. He beheld the pouting ruby lips and the eyes of sapphire; he saw the line and curve of the most voluptuous body he had ever known, and all in its perfect female symmetry. Ebhardt considered Laura's pretty face and he noted something else too, something that confused him even more. Laura was smiling back at Marcilla.

'Nonsense,' he muttered resentfully as he pulled Laura tighter, closer, shielding rather than holding her, hypocritically envious and aware that Laura was enjoying the attention. He spun her about, turning their backs to Marcilla. 'She's looking at you.'

Precisely on the stroke of nine o'clock a black stallion with flashing silver hoof, ridden by a figure wrapped in coal-dyed cloth galloped along the carriage road that led up to General Spielsdorf's house. Around the horseman the shadows roiled, and as he approached the great marble and granite entry to the mansion the rider drew alongside a motionless and sable carriage. A chill wind blew a scatter of leaves across the rider's path. Quickly a young groom ran forward to secure the lone steed's reins and the rider dismounted in a tenebrous wave, his cloak unfurling in a banner of ebony and scarlet. He raised an arm to the night, his face and form a silhouette in the burnished light of the moon, and extending a riding crop the man pointed and waved it as if in a secret signal to the coachman seated high on his box. The carriage jostled slightly as its horses snorted and impatiently shook their heads, and the coach driver bowed lowly. This newcomer was met at the steps by the door attendant, Conrad, and Conrad shivered. The man in black, darker than midnight, flowed into the brightly lit ballroom like a ghastly, ominous stain and stood and stared. At the appearance of this Delphian apparition, the music abruptly stopped and a dreadful pall hung over the General's unsuspecting merrymakers. It was as if a dark omen had come among the happy crowd. The Countess dropped her smile and ceased laughing when she beheld the man in black staring at her. Abruptly she released herself from the dance and from General Spielsdorf's arms, a crease of worry etching itself into her brow. Laura and her beau took the last steps of their waltz and stopped directly before the spectre in jet. Both looked in puzzlement at the newcomer. Across the room Marcilla and her handsome partner ceased dancing too; the young people all bowed and applauded each other, unaware of the gaunt spectre that had descended upon their gathering. Upon some unspoken signal, the Countess dropped her smile, and turned back to the General.

'Excuse me, General,' said the Countess, her eyes clouded by a look of silent doubt.

'Of course,' replied General Spielsdorf as he watched the Countess step away.

He looked on with much curiosity as the man in ebony and scarlet removed his tall black hat with a hand encased in black leather riding gloves. The man was frightfully pale, in fact his skin was so pale as to be of an unhealthy pallor indeed, and his lips were by contrast vividly crimson. He stood upon the platform, a cold and sibylline pillar, darksome and foreshadowing some fated intelligence, holding a riding crop in one hand and his silver buckled hat in the other. The man did not descend into the crowd to greet the Countess, though she immediately moved toward him. The strange man watched her with hard and cold eyes as she approached. Those eyes looked down upon her and they flickered in silent authority so that the Countess bowed as if she were in the presence of some royal absolute. It was as if she were but a peon and he the master to which she must yield; the power dynamic being rehearsed was explicit and did not go unnoticed by the General. He wondered at the man in black, was he the Countess's husband? What news was he about to impart that had caused his lovely guest such an expression of anxiety? General Spielsdorf felt a little shiver of uncertainty ripple along his spine and he froze for a moment. He could not help but think himself weak and silly for entertaining a fancy that the man in black, one who seemed to demand absolute obedience even by the power of a look, was a symbol for some darker and deeper evil that had just blown through his front door. There could be no doubt as to the meaning of the man's body language, for a definite mystery, distinctly hostile, emanated from those folds of black and red. From that dark mantle, the haughty attitude and the cool contempt for the Countess spilled into the ballroom, and she in doubt and in his thrall, was reduced to an inferior. The man in black leaned forward, ever so slightly, bringing his thin red lips in line with the woman's right ear, but the General was not close enough to hear what the man whispered, and besides, the whole room had begun to buzz with chatter.

This was a new spectacle, a theatrical and masculine display of power, one of shadow over fire and it had set all the tongues in the room wagging yet again. The General turned to the orchestra and signalled with a wave of a white gloved hand that they should recommence playing a tune at once, anything to divert the sudden attention away from that man in black. He was a bad omen, like a crow, and the General feared that the stranger had unveiled a cloud upon the festivities and upon the good cheer of the party guests. He thought it best if the music set them all to dancing again. As the young people resumed their dance the Countess turned away from the mysterious gentleman and her face had paled to the hue of chalk. Distressing news had obviously been delivered and a look of confusion and worriment crossed her countenance. A trembling hand came up to rest above her heart. She was obviously trying to preserve her calm but this was belied by the blanched hue of her visage and whatever had been said no less bespoke of nothing favourable. She shook her head as she walked back to General Spielsdorf's side.

'Bad news?' asked the General.

'A dear friend of mine is dying,' replied the Countess gravely, and although her tone had become ominous her eyes were still lucid.

'Oh, I am so sorry.'

'You will forgive me for leaving you like this?' the Countess said falteringly, blinking her long lashes and looking all and every bit lost and confused, but earnestly apologetic.

The General quickly noted her new anxiety. 'Is there anything I can do?'

People had begun to stare again and this made the General painfully aware of his guest's discomfort.

'Well, I…' The Countess dropped her eyes and her voice, and her sentence hovered over an obviously difficult contemplation. When she began again she glanced in the direction of her daughter. 'Oh, I hardly dare to ask you, but…'

The handsome woman looked aside and her cheeks flushed rosy with embarrassment, 'my daughter, Marcilla...'

The General followed her glance and he saw the stunningly beautiful girl as she spun and whirled in the arms of her young partner. She was having a wonderful time, happy and laughing, smiling in the arms of the young man in green velvet. Her slender hands were entwined in the hands of the youth and as she danced her high breasts swelled so that they all but escaped from the bodice of her low-cut dress, the hues of her pink skin glowing hotly under the shimmering fabric as her body swayed. Catching himself staring the General tore his gaze back to the Countess. A half-knowing smile seemed to lift the corners of the Countess's lips. It was almost as if the General were conscious of being deliberately snatched up in a net and the girls' gorgeous flesh was the bait that most men could neither deny nor resist. Yet the Countess no doubt had mistaken his stare for a barely concealed lust, like all the men in the room were lusting, but in this instance, she could not have been further from the truth. The General was perturbed. From somewhere far away, in the deeper recesses of his mind the General understood that what would be asked of him would be a decision made in haste. Although he seemed powerless, and the laws of hospitality abiding, he knew he would acquiesce.

'It is a long journey,' the Countess added hastily. 'We must ride all night.'

'My dear Countess,' returned the General, falteringly, not understanding his own weakness of the moment, 'I assure you it would be my pleasure to look after your daughter.'

His words were impulsive, and the fire of some unheralded victory sparked green in the Countess's eye as he spoke. It was like a secret, nameless knowledge that no man can contradict, one that registered recognition of Marcilla's great allure with a sly twist at the edges of the Countess's smile. As he made reply the General felt a stab of shame as the words left his mouth. 'If you so wish,' he added quickly, but the die had been cast and the Countess gasped in appreciation.

'She'll be good company for Laura,' he assured the Countess, although he was far from reassured in himself. There was a secret at work here, he was suspicious of that, and it was cloaked in innocence. Yet what could he do, for he had been so easily beguiled by the impulse of female charm, and now he was caught in its fatal influence. Would the girl prove good company for Laura? Perhaps she might take his niece's mind off young Ebhardt? It was guilt that justified Laura needing good company to break up the monotony of this pastoral life. The General briefly pondered his words, and hopeful that no unfortunate impropriety had been intimated, he smiled at the Countess. In the light of Emma Morton leaving the party early and Laura's own visit to the Morton house still some weeks away, it might not be such a bad thing if the beautiful young Countess stayed for a few days as a guest, although in his heart he could not so easily put aside his reservation about that.

'General,' said the Countess delightedly, 'you are too kind!'

'Not at all,' the man responded, and something in his head was even more distracted. He couldn't help but think that he had been cajoled, and this suspicion bewildered him. When, he asked himself, had he ever gone weak in the presence of female beauty?

Before he could utter another word, the Countess interjected. 'I must tell Marcilla.' Abruptly she stepped away from the General, and the man in black placed his tall hat back upon his raven locks and waited silently. Marcilla's handsome young partner had been letting his eye pass freely over her exquisite body. Not that this bothered the girl at all, in fact she seemed to encourage his flirtations. With a smile, she wordlessly acquiesced to the fervour of his clasp and encouraged him to act without fear of rebuke of censure. She deliberately pressed her bosom against him as their bodies met. The young man could not believe how beautiful Marcilla was, and was engulfed in her physicality. How her thick tresses cascaded and lifted in the air, how her red lips glistened, how her breasts were so soft and high and proud and how the cherry nipples peeped from just under the low cut of her gown. He wanted to put his lips to those breasts, to lie between her parted thighs and thrust, and he felt his sex going hard again. Marcilla's eyes sparkled as if she knew all his lurid thoughts and her lips curled up in another enigmatic smile. Through the surging tide of floating dancers, the Countess pressed forward to her daughter, and as she drew near she indicated with a slim white finger that the girl should approach. The younger woman detached herself from her partner and turned an ear to her mother. The older woman talked and the younger barely responded, nodding only slightly when her mother took hold of her hand. There were brief but serious looks exchanged. All about the two women a kaleidoscope of gaudy colours reeled, the music a waltz, the dancers intoxicated by romance. Shortly thereafter the Countess kissed her daughter on the cheek and turned in a flutter of obsidian and gold and departed with the man in black. Marcilla stood motionless as she watched her mother go, but it was only for a moment, and then she spun back to her young man and re-joined him in the dance. He smiled triumphantly as he took her in his arms.

Outside, in the carriageway under the great Grecian columned portico, the Countess, wrapped in her travelling cloak, swirled in an indigo cloud that swept her into the waiting vehicle. A footman folded up the carriage steps and closed the door. Behind the coach the man in black leapt into the saddle of his dusky steed, its nostrils flaring as it stamped at the ground.

'I am so sorry,' the Countess said to General Spielsdorf, her face falling into shadow behind the dark glass of the carriage window. She extended her hand in final farewell.

The General took that hand in his own and gently kissed her palm. 'Goodbye, and a safe journey.'

The Countess nodded, but the dark within the coach washed over her face and the General saw only the lamplight rippling in her green eyes from within the hood of her cape. The vehicle jolted forward, its team straining against the shafts and the harness, eager to be off at a gallop and the General watched solemnly as it was swallowed up by the night, the black horseman riding after. General Spielsdorf stood staring at the disappearing vehicle, wondering about the suddenness of it all and the mysterious new charge with whom he had been left. He pondered all until his door attendant, Conrad, motioned that he should return to the party and come out of the chilly air. Reluctantly leaving the night behind in favour of the candlelight, the General went in search of his niece. After many dances Laura rested and her uncle poured for her a glass of sweet punch; she was beaming happily with a radiant smile upon her rosette lips.

'Are you tired, uncle?' asked Laura, noting her uncle had drifted into a vague distraction, and he responded with a wan smile.

'Would you like her to stay with us, Laura?' General Spielsdorf was absently watching the dancers, roving his glance across the party guests. He could not see young Ebhardt and his voice seemed somehow detached, bored even.

For a moment, he regretted having offered to accommodate the Countess of availing her daughter upon him. Perhaps he might have asked Laura first, but young girls always loved the company of other young girls. They all wanted nothing more than to fill their vapid lives with endless chat about silly things, about who was who in society and especially about falling in love and ridiculous romance. If only these young women could understand that love was not the superficial commodity they thought it was, but rather something beyond the flesh. The General shook his head, for who was he to talk, like he knew anything at all about love. He almost laughed aloud at his extreme hypocrisy. A guest's presence in the house of course meant that his own passionate dealings would have to be more discreet, more guarded, but he was not overly concerned because shadows always obscured reality. In such a reality, you might simply be uncertain what it was you thought you saw.

'Of course, uncle,' said Laura, sensing that he was preoccupied by other thoughts, 'but, where is she?'

Looking around they found the object of their conversation absent. Marcilla was indeed nowhere to be seen.

In the dark, outside in the park, Marcilla emerged from the house and came out under the trees. Her skin was shining white like ivory in the light of the moon, her dress a deep splash of undulating crimson as it rippled between the shadows. She paused, listening to the music playing inside the ballroom, then after a while she moved silently away from the house. If one could move without taking a step then that is how Marcilla moved through the dark, for she glided toward the forested incline, casting a strangely twisted shadow upon the ground as she passed. The shadow undulated and pulsed with a glinting agate cadence as if it belonged to some form of creature that was surely not a young woman. It had a shape that suggested vacillating wings, a throbbing and elongated body; a tail like a great feline beast. The shadow was all these things at the same time, and it spilled along the turf in an oily slick, rolling over stone and flint, over flower and lawn and brush. In her wake, a rose bush withered and its cerise petals fell into etiolated ashes. Up on the hill the man in black waited for her, his cloak flapping like a pestiferous sail filled with the wind of oblivion, red like fire and dark like a raven's wings. His face was a mask of chalk, the cheeks hollow, his lips grey in the moonlight. Atop his mount this figure grew in immensity, bloating up in a thundercloud, a dark disentanglement, a restlessly impalpable Charybdis. As the beautiful girl approached the rider his pale visage seemed split into an animal mask, a chilling smile that was a slash of red and ivory, a mouth studded with rows of wetly glinting, long, sharp and vulpine fangs.

Chapter 3

Troubled Dreams

In which Laura begins having disturbing dreams that manifest at night in the form of a spectral cat.

In the afternoon sunshine, Laura and her new friend Marcilla, walked along the annex that bordered the garden. Marcilla moved languidly in the shade under the terrace and did not come out into the declining sunlight. Yet even in the cooler shadows, in the light of the waning day, she was if anything even more radiant than she had appeared the night before. A young woman at the height of her beauty, her skin was almost translucent as if it were a mantle cast from the finest porcelain; under the surface could be glimpsed the delicate tracery of blue veins. The girl's hair was dark brown and so thick and heavy, and of a most marvellous sheen; it cascaded freely upon her shoulders and about her bosom. The light of broken stars glittered in its thick tresses and it smelled of gentle perfumes, of mild spices, of dried roses and civet. Today the spectacular red gown she had worn the night before was given over in favour of a gossamer thin dress of silken sky blue. The garment perfectly augmented the shape of the girl's body and all its curves, her hips, her breasts; its waistline was raised high and tied off beneath her bosom with a shiny ribbon that was a shade darker blue. Marcilla's dress left nothing to the imagination; her perfect bosoms were displayed proudly, provocatively, and without shame, by the obviously low-cut neckline of her bodice. A huge ruby glowed dangling on a golden filigree chain, it nestled hotly between her breasts. Laura's dress by comparison was much more conservative. The General's niece had chosen a light artichoke-green striped drop whose neckline was enclosed by an embroidered lace-work of white flowers; the hem was sewn with forest-green stem leaf. About her waist was tied a pretty but naïve velvet bow, a matching ribbon bound her yellow locks. In comparison, Laura looked every bit the pretty little girl as she strolled alongside her sophisticated companion. The beautiful stranger was weaving a crown of ivy as she paced indolently close to her new friend.

The morning sun had woken Laura with an insistent nudge, and the excitement of speaking with the visitor had found Laura eager for a new friendship. She had waited at the breakfast table for Marcilla to come down from her room, but Marcilla had not come upon the summons and the morning had gradually disappeared. Laura could hardly conceal her disappointment. Surely the beautiful stranger would be eager for congress? Laura had thought about their new guest all the morning, from the first moment she had woken. Who might she be? Laura thoughts tumbled over and over, thoughts about all the things she would ask Marcilla, and she would listen to the new arrival's every word with anticipation and excitement, and then want to learn more. What was her family name? Where had she been living before they moved into the old Baroness Meinster's house? Had she travelled abroad? Where was her mother journeying to last night? Who was the man in black? Was he her father? So many questions to ask, but most of the day had already expired and Laura sat alone with only disappointment for company. The young woman had resisted the compulsion to run upstairs and knock upon Marcilla's door, knowing that the girl would be tired from her journey and further exhausted from the party. There was no need to be vulgar in the pursuit of gratification, but it was an agony of waiting that tortured Laura, and in discontent she had retreated to the library and had tried to settle to a romance. Outside the printed page she found her mind wandering and wondering. There was little allure to be had in the turgid tale she had chosen, a tale about a woman whose rival for a man's affections was a murderess. She could not concentrate on 'Zofloya' despite its promises of sensation and romance, and she closed its covers and left it on the library settee. The housekeeper had then brought Laura morning tea, smiling with her benign and ruddy face, yet the tea was without flavour and it was not what Laura desired in any case. There would be nothing sweeter than to talk happily with Marcilla.

Laura had joined her uncle for lunch and they had dined on a dish of thinly sliced Leberkäse served on semmel with savoury Bavarian mustard followed by sweet apples from the General's own orchard. The General had informed her that young Ebhardt was visiting a neighbouring estate, organising the erection of a barn, and that he may be away for a few days. Laura was distracted upon this point and oddly indifferent. She looked instead at the apples in the dish, freshly aromatic and tempting, but she only marvelled at how those apples shone in the noon-day sunshine like the huge ornamental ruby that dangled on its golden chain about Marcilla's neck. Despite the sweet apples and these lovely dishes, all seemed bland, and Laura found that she did not wish to eat. The young woman did not partake and the General took note. Astir for want of communication with her new house guest, Laura sighed. The General had enjoyed his midday repast but had gently reprimanded Laura upon her lack of appetite. In a fit of lassitude Laura had retreated to a bench under the portico from which she saw the flight of bright blue butterflies among the flowers, and as the afternoon drew on, the shadows of the trees lengthened into long black fingers. In fact, it was not until afternoon tea had come and gone that Marcilla finally made an appearance, and by that time the clock in the main hall had chimed the hour of four. Marcilla had excused herself, saying that she had danced too much the night before and had been so tired as to stay in bed all day. Despite this, Laura leapt from her seat and the new arrival embraced her and kissed her cheek. Laura smiled joyously.

'You did frighten us last night,' Laura commented, looking at Marcilla in earnest, her face becoming etched with a sudden worry.

There could be no excuse for the disquiet it had caused. The servants had searched high and low through every room in the house and had not been able to locate the beautiful guest. They had feared the worst, that she had been abducted or run off in pique after her mother. General Spielsdorf had been upon the brink of dispatching a courier until he realised in his embarrassment that he knew not to where the Countess had gone. It was a most perplexing and foolish situation in which to be placed, especially if it ultimately involved the authorities. The General could hardly admit that he had fallen under such a powerful guile.

'I went for a walk,' Marcilla responded. 'Your uncle's estate is so big I lost myself.'

'For hours!' Laura exclaimed incredulously. 'Everyone was looking for you, and then you suddenly appeared,' continued Laura, 'as if by magic.'

Marcilla tilted her bewitchingly beautiful face and gently smiled, halting in her slow pace beside a sundial with its hours etched decoratively in brass, a terracotta planter filled with bright yellow flowers at her back. She turned to face Laura. When the ravishing stranger stared into Laura's eyes the world abruptly underwent a peculiar change, as if it had momentarily stopped. The birds ceased their song in the brush, the horses in the stables and the geese in the cook's garden, all were silent. No sound drifted from the house.

'You must not worry about me. I like to wander off on my own sometimes.'

Marcilla reached out and placed her hand upon Laura's arm and its lingering caress smouldered like an ember that wanted to flare into full flame. The touch was light, like the wings of a moth, and it burned in a strange but pleasing way. It was extraordinary how Laura heard only the sound of Marcilla's voice and felt only the girl's touch. It was the sound of euphony, choral, sweet, and melodious. Its tone was more alluring perhaps than the sweet tongue of the young Mr. Ebhardt. The two women stood locked in a moment of absolute silence. Nothing else broke into the moment, the rest of existence tumbled into nothing. The fading sun flared in a bright and titan coronal flare, a stream of yellow particles more intense than any blaze ever witnessed in the heavens, and it filled Laura's eyes with light. She felt the sudden throb of her heartbeat and the rush of the blood through her veins. That rush was like a river of molten fire and the sensation was new and altogether inexplicable. In that syrupy light, there was only the blindingly glorious and indescribably beautiful form of Marcilla. The young woman's silhouette shimmered in the pale light, and Laura gazed in a trance at the sensuous movement of Marcilla's lips, how they glistened like pomegranate, and even there in the shade of the glacis, a fire, like a liquid thread of gold, sparked on the chain that encircled her neck. When she lifted her arms and raised her hands, there was poise and elegance in every movement. It was a strangely glorious feeling for Laura, just to look upon this marvellously beautiful girl, it made one feel a warm rush, a desire that was intoxicating and wanton. The feeling was so unlike any other she had ever experienced. With just one gaze, just one touch Marcilla had awakened what men had failed to awaken, what young Ebhardt did not truly stir in her soul. Had she been fooling herself all this time, telling herself that she loved Carl and only Carl? Marcilla dropped her voice to a whisper and sang to Laura as if she understood her thoughts.

'Dear Laura,' she said, taking back her slim hand and returning to the final interlacing thread of ivy that she had been fashioning into a laurel. Marcilla reached up and placed the leafy halo upon Laura's blonde head. 'I do feel we'll be such good friends.'

'Silly,' Laura responded after a mute moment, for it was like her senses had been overcome, 'we already are.'

Marcilla smiled and stroked Laura's golden tresses and ran her fingers through them. The touch sent a shiver through the girl's spine, a not disagreeable frisson, but a thrill that could not be given name.

'How beautiful you are,' Marcilla told her, and the world of the tenuous blinked back in with the chirping of birds, the bark of a hound and the hum of insects. Gradually, with the shadow of the gnomon passing across the plate of the sun dial, the signs of reality returned. A servant girl was calling from the apple orchard; yet the world still sounded hollow and far away.

'Now you're just teasing me,' Laura told her new friend, 'like Carl always does.' Marcilla seemed to make a small but derisive sound and Laura's lips opened upon a question, but the question was quelled upon the instant.

'Carl?' Marcilla asked.

'Yes, Carl Ebhardt. You know, the handsome young man I was dancing with last night.'

Marcilla blinked her blue eyes, flashing away recognition of Carl in less time than it took to draw a breath.

'I too danced with a handsome young man last night,' said Marcilla and she caressed Laura's pink cheek with the back of her hand, 'but I shall not be marrying him.'

'How did you know?' asked Laura, her cheek tingling under the electric touch of the other girl.

'That I won't be marrying the young man I danced with or that you will be marrying Carl?'

'Don't make fun, you know what I meant.'

'How could I not know?' Marcilla's tone was taciturn, contradictory to her meaning and she tilted her head just a fraction to the left, glancing over the park and beyond the trees. Laura followed her gaze. There was nothing there in the near distance that she could see, only green, gold, and cool shadows, and the slope of the forest as it rose into the hinterland.

'Is it that obvious?' Laura asked, turning back to Marcilla, and it was a strange thing to feel, this abrupt and unwanted doubt about being wed that was now in her mind. She had not felt uncertainty before, not this weird misgiving that made her a little light-headed, and all because a stranger was here with her, in the garden suggesting strange things and touching her as she had never been touched before. The girl gave an indifferent sigh and she encircled Laura's waist with her arms and pressed her close in a tight embrace. That embrace was lingering but it was also compelling and it made Laura feel somehow alive, a sensation, a thrill almost that communicated her acceptance to the deliverer. Laura shuddered, but it was not a disagreeable shiver and Marcilla, as if she were fully aware of the power of her touch, gave a little half-smile and shrugged. Laura's senses filled up with the scent of magnolia and roses and she reeled almost upon the point of fainting. As Marcilla's beautiful carmine smile made an arc of her lovely mouth, she lowered her hand and in so doing waved away any further thoughts of Carl Ebhardt. After a short while they walked hand in hand back into the house, and therefore Laura did not see that the shadow had frozen on the face of the sundial and that the celandine in the terracotta pot had withered and died.

The moon blossomed in an indigo firmament like a great silver discus. It glimmered hazily, the heavy drapes were pulled back, and the lacy curtain spread in dappled gauze across the moon's sterling face, changing the density of its light. A window lay open to the stars. By this subdued light all else in the apartment was as still as the bottom of the ocean is still. Moreover, all was silent. The girl stood by the window, looking out through the veil of tulle, her reflection cast in the silver surface of a looking glass. She stood as still as a statue, looking like a ghost. When the breeze did stir the lace, it blended in whiteness with the thin gossamer fabric of her gown, making both of light and air and ethereal. Under the sheer fabric could be glimpsed the pale circles of her nipples and the triangular thatch of hair at her pelvis. Her shadow flickered against the wall at her back, distorted and unlike the shape of a young girl; her face was as white as the drapes. The girl's eyes were wide, entranced, watching and waiting in suspense, in a strange agony. Her anticipation was betrayed in her wild expectant gaze and the tense attitude of her flesh. She gazed intently into the fireless darkness and she listened. To her the night sounded with a terrible bedlam, there was noise and din in every breath, every step, every trill, and every howl. The girl could hear the horses in the stables, she could hear the housekeeper as she snored in her slumbers, she could hear the rats in the barn squeaking and scratching. There were owls in the trees and there were fleet and timid deer in the forest ways. Something else was here too, something that bestrode the accursed nightmare. The phantom had ridden into the park on a black horse, and with it the landscape had changed, darkened into a bedlam that promised a cold, caliginous storm. With a brittle caress, the chill had drawn the girl to the window, with a fervent command it bade her enter the night. The darkness called her by name.

Night breathed in attendance and spread a sable mantle over General Spielsdorf's Palladian estate. Under the glimmer of a gibbous moon coal-dyed shadows coiled about the vertical shafts of high Corinthian columns. A crisp and shivery wind blew in from the alpine north, scattering rust-coloured leaves in fleeting swirling vortices, and bending the spines of the tallest poplars. The suffocating silences were broken by the startled cry of a bird and the sound's splintered echo sang throughout the park. From the stables, the agitated pitch of a horse whiney might have been heard, a dog was howling somewhere far off in the dark. Something from the Pit ventured into the night. Up the granite façade of the manor house the wind swept, thrusting and forcing the shadows toward the roof in a rising black tide, spilling up the fluted concave pillars and flowing along the stone like ink spilled into midnight. The shades roiled and rippled over column and capital, reaching claw-like to an upper storey window. There the shadows arrested and hesitated, pulsing and throbbing. It was as if the darkness paused and glanced over an imaginary shoulder, as if assuring itself that it was unobserved, before turning back and swelling in the casement. At the occluded Sirlian mouth of Laura's window the shadows stained the unadorned entablatures before gathering into a tight knot and breaching the window glass. The brass latches on the inside sprang back with a soundless click and the frames thrust inward. There the dark pulled the heavy velvet drapes aside and danced the flimsy lace in a pallid eclipse of dusk and starless silver, billowing in a silent wind, flapping noiselessly, like a sail unfurling before the rising gale. Dust glittered in a sliver of argent moonlight, pewter, and brass together, whirling, floating, and spinning. A candle had burned itself out on the bedside table, little streams of tallow had run down, and pooled in the saucer, the wick had been spent hours ago. The shadows entered the room and brought with them troubled dreams. As they spilled across the Persian carpet, across the oval portraits, across the argent surface of the mirror, Laura began to writhe in her sleep. Lost in her four-poster sea of oyster sheets and claret velvet, she threw her pretty head about on her satin pillow. Unsettled, she gave a little gasp, a little moan, and the floating impalpable dusts were aeriform in the moonlight and stirred about her, never settling, agitated, and dancing.

The darkness began to deepen and within it a shadow commenced to emerge, to take on form, and to pace across the breadth of the room. It wove back and forth and as it did so it moved inexorably toward the bed and closer to the sleeping girl. Slipping lithely, the shadow was elegant and slim, but still indefinable, coming closer and closer to the bed. In black and wispy trails, it danced, pulsing in its visitation, tripping softly in its stride, a pacing strut that began measuring a weird tempo. As the fascination paced its ethereal body wove in a mixture of blue, black and gray, its flesh forming in purple rosettes. The room dimmed darker, and Laura dreamed. She dreamed that the black familiar possessed eyes, and those eyes watched her, huge round and sapphire blue. Those eyes fixed her with a longing, desiring and yet terrifying gaze. The eyes blinked as stars blink in the blackness, flaming jewels darting in the folds of stained pitch, while all about those eyes the night began solidifying into a form almost corporeal. In the dark, powdery grains as dust danced an ethereal ballet about her bed. In the glimmering moonlight, they threaded into Laura's hair, plaited it with copper threads and like glitter they spread over her pillow. The airs in the room seemed to grow thicker, denser, and colder and as the light drained away the whole bedroom appeared to alter, changing in the dimness, bleeding away all hue and tint. The powder green wallpaper faded to grey, the crimson drapes of the four-poster leeched into charcoal, the gleam of the looking glass blinked into a pool of depthless black-silver. Restlessly the darkness roved back and forth, gathering the dust motes unto its shapeless form and turning the entire room into a stark monochromatic dreamscape. As the land of sleep became colourless, the dark began to solidify and to morph, to take on substance out of a spectral form.

It began moulding the substance of night from the nothing, shifting and churning, the shades quickening as it prowled like a wild beast, its shadow thrown on the wall suggesting the shape of a great cat. The thing was composed from the framework of witchcraft, and it seethed as the night crossed back and forth, drawing closer and closer as the pretty young woman tossed about helpless in her bower. Laura's dream was indeed wondrous but it also swelled with a nasty hostility. Frozen in a paralysis the girl struggled to open her eyes, struggled to wake up. In her mind Laura had the strange ideate notion that anger was at the core of the shadow, of the dream, and it evoked a familiar face amid the cloudy coils of the phantasy, but the glimpse of that face was brief and indefinable. The face belonged to someone she only half knew, someone she held dear. It was the face of someone who cherished her, made her happy. There was a curious reassurance in the fleeting half recognition, yet even as she thought this the vision responded with a soft, purring snarl and flickered again to black. The shadow of a shadow at last towered gigantically over the bed and up the wall, expanding almost all the way up to the ceiling. It grew bigger and bigger still, and as it distended it called out to Laura by name. Caught up in its rhapsody Laura whimpered and the phantasm parted the pall of black and at length, becoming thickly corporeal, it leapt up upon the bed, sprang upon the covers and the great blue eyes hovered above Laura's frozen gaze. The dark settled in beside her on the bed. The form was heavy, its padded feet sinking into the covers, moving upward and towards her face. It reached forward and a chill caress brushed the young woman's ivory cheek only to settle with a kiss that died on her lips and stifled the scream rising in her throat. The kiss lingered upon Laura's lips and it tasted foetid and corrupt. Laura's lips turned from cherry and then to wine in the darkening illumination. The kiss parted her lips and invaded her mouth, sliding over her tongue and down her throat, choking off the air that she breathed and filling her with a retching, heaving convulsive horror. Yet the night was seductive, it benumbed as much as it assaulted, dragged the girl down into a sea of intangible fears and hideously strange longings. Like a fragile shell borne in the undertow, rolled over and over, and spun into a dizzying liquid maelstrom, Laura began to toss about and groan aloud, gasping, unable to shake the horror off or catch her breath. She felt her heart racing, heard its volume ascending, pounding in her ears. She felt somehow that she had tempted the nightmare, and it inspired a feeling of guilt within her heart. Laura did not know why. Nonetheless, she knew that it was useless to resist, she knew that in refusal it would have come anyway, a thief in the night intent on ravaging her soul. She tried desperately to throw it off. In response to her mounting terror Laura felt it begin to caress her body, to soothe away her protests even as she threw up her hands to ward away the danger.

The shadows were icy, chill filaments and splintering fragments of glacial numbness that began freezing Laura's body from head to toe, consuming her. 'No,' she managed through the choking malaise that filled up her mouth and 'no' again, and yet again. Ignoring her protests, the frozen mantle of the nightmare moved so that it was now on top of her, mounting her, its coldness penetrating through the bedclothes. Soon it pulled the covers away from her body, and Laura shivered, exposed to the cold. The dream began to pulsate, to rise, and fall in time to Laura's laboured breath. Up it rose as she struggled to breathe in, down it fell as she let go the gasping air from her lungs. The shadow sucked in each breath, and its form was dense and heavy, like a block of cold stone, crushing her down, paralysing her body, but growing warmer with every moment. Terror raced through Laura's veins. She was held in thrall, helpless as this pulsing, throbbing motion continued, and Laura felt as if she were floating in a tidal swell where the pull of the night waves battered her body. Obsidian surges caught her up and took her high, the same undulations mercilessly threw her down again. The coils of night cast a dreadful net that entangled her. The shadows were taut, great looping tendrils of rope, and these night ropes held her down, and then held her apart. She felt a horrible and yet exciting sensation begin below her pelvis, as if something slippery and rigid were prying her thighs apart, touching her intimately and deeply. Laura heard her own weak cry of protest, part denial, and part consent, but she knew the sound was useless, for her lips were muffled under a gag of stifling black.

Something previously unbeknown to Laura had found the virginal entrance to her body and something insistent and hard wanted ingress into her most secret and sacred parts. She groaned and gasped as the darkness solidified and probed, testing the locked gate of her sex, pressing inward, and wetly. Laura struggled and resisted, and the nightmare pushed harder, and then retracted and then pushed harder again. The young woman felt her velvet interior stretching and stretching wider to a point where it must give and snap and the night would flood into her flesh in a thrumming crescendo of pulsing triumph. As the violation reached that penultimate moment in which Laura's nerves became electrified and her pelvis shuddered and became hot, wet, and viscous, she felt a stinging pain, twofold, run deep into her breast. The pain was abrupt and intense and it burned its way like a firebrand all the way to her heart. Laura awoke and screamed… and screamed again and again and again.

The General awoke to the screaming, and the screaming resounded in a terrifying cacophony that shattered the calm of the late hour and ran a shiver of fright into every soul in the house. The housekeeper, woken from her snoring leapt from her bed and without her slippers, ran from her room. General Spielsdorf was already dashing headlong up the corridor in the direction of his niece's room, tying his velvet night jacket about his middle as he did so. Another maid appeared in the hall. They were all confused and all frightened at the calamity. In the passing of a few heart beats the General had made it to Laura's bedroom, where the girl was sitting erect in her bower and still screaming hysterically as he entered. The room was cold, as if it were already winter, a candle had been burning by the bedside but its orange flame had died, and the room danced in the semi darkness of the light of the moon. The window was open and the drapes were swirling. A young maid entered carrying a lighted lamp and she shivered and pulled her shawl closer about her shoulders. The housekeeper following, lit a taper and gave its flame to a new candle on the dresser. The candle fluttered in the chill wind and when it settled the room filled up with waxen light and chased away the shadows. Spielsdorf rushed up to his niece's bedside and at once began to calm her. She ceased to scream when she saw and recognised him but her screams had only turned to frightened whimpers and the General tried his best to soothe away her terrors.

'Laura, what is it!' he exclaimed, his nerves jangling, his arms reaching forward, his own shaking fingers taking the girl's hand. She grasped at him and held tight and she was trembling like a leaf in a frenzied wind, gooseflesh dimpling her arms. Laura's hand was as cold as ice. Amid the convulsive upheavals of her breath she was trying to speak. 'What is it, what is it?' the General repeated, and then not having ever had such an experience before in his military life, he began to mutter silly pacifying words to alleviate the panic and chase away the horror. 'There... there,' he said softly, soothing her as if she were a child, or worse, a pet, and looking to the housekeeper for reassurance while Laura began to sob and weep, her hair dishevelled, her nightdress gaping at the bosom. The General discretely pulled the sheet up and covered the shivering maiden.

'It was a cat,' Laura managed at last in a broken sentence, 'a huge cat. It was choking me!' She clutched at her throat and wept.

The General reached up and stroked her cheek. The housekeeper moved forward and looked to the General and as Laura wept, a diamond tear spilled from her eye. Coming up to the bedside the housekeeper took Laura's hand and squeezed it gently.

'There, there,' she said, and now the housekeeper was doing what her uncle did, mouthing infantile cajolements. Laura wanted to protest that her mind had not suffered some sort of handicap, nor had her feelings, and their ineptitudes were insulting and distressing. 'You were having a nightmare,' the older woman said, her face a pale wide moon ridiculously topped off with the puff of a cream and fringed nightcap. 'That's all.'

However, it was not all, and Laura was certain of that. The nightmare had been real. Why would no one listen to her? The housekeeper sat upon the edge of the bed and nestled in to the girl's side amid the havoc of rumpled sheets and eiderdown. She began to smooth out the creases from the sheets to make Laura more comfortable. With a defeated and passive sigh, the young girl lay back upon her pillow. It would do no good to protest, they would not listen anyway. No doubt she was suffering from female troubles and why should anyone concern themselves over that?

'Now you settle down,' the housekeeper coaxed warmly, 'and have a nice sleep.'

It was beyond Laura how she was ever to get to sleep again tonight after such a horrific nightmare. She did not want to be left alone, not in the dark. She tried to nod to the housekeeper but it was useless

'That's right,' soothed the woman. 'There we are.'

Laura felt exhausted. She reached up and wiped away her tears. 'I'm sorry,' she said, looking to her uncle and drawing the covers up around her breasts, but she was beyond embarrassment at this point, for the dream had been so real, so terrifying.

'That's all right. You gave us all quite a fright though. We thought it was some prowler.' The General leaned forward and spoke another string of inept nothings and with a trembling and uncertain hand touched his niece's cheek. She smiled wanly. 'Now you try and get some rest.' He leant over and kissed her forehead. 'Goodnight darling.'

'There,' said the housekeeper smiling benevolently, 'you'll be all right now.'

Nevertheless, Laura was not reassured. She feared that as soon as her uncle left her room the darkness would return. She had never experienced a nightmare of such vivid intensity before and she did not want to close her eyes again lest the cat returned. The General turned to the maid holding the lamp.

'It's all right,' he told her, nodding that she could go. 'Thank you.'

The maid curtsied and departed. Now that the door frame was empty it only accentuated an emptier, gaping void through which the others must pass and leave Laura alone. As he moved away from Laura's bedside the General cast a concerned glance about the room. He looked quickly to the wardrobe but it was closed, and he glanced under the bed, but there was nothing there. The window was open and there was a breeze rippling the curtains, but the room was on an upper storey and it was highly unlikely that an intruder had climbed so far up the side of the house. He crossed to the window and glanced down into the garden. All he could see were the grey smudges of the topiary and the stencils of frozen statuary. He closed the portal against the chill airs, fastening the brass latch. Motioning silently to the housekeeper they both left the room. Laura smiled weakly as she watched them go. Nervously she looked toward the window. Outside her room, in the red carpeted corridor, the General and the housekeeper hesitated.

'Oh,' gasped the housekeeper, 'such screams! It's enough to wake the dead.'

She paused and turned to face General Spielsdorf. 'It must have frightened poor Marcilla to death.'

The General nodded his agreement. 'Better see how she is.'

They walked quickly but quietly up the corridor and the General knocked gently upon Marcilla's door. There was no response. The housekeeper in turn tapped again. A few seconds passed.

'Marcilla,' whispered the housekeeper, but no reply followed.

As the housekeeper commenced her knocking again General Spielsdorf stayed her hand. 'Let her sleep,' he told her, almost unbelieving that the young woman could have slept through all that cacophony.

'All right,' replied the housekeeper, only too happy to return to her bedroom and hopefully to sleep. 'Good night.'

The two separated and the housekeeper disappeared into her room. The General passed a hand through his hair and shook his head. After the gaiety of the party it had turned into a disturbing night indeed.

A gentle wind was blowing with a lilting sigh and dancing the curtains; there was no light in Marcilla's room except the silver moonbeams, and they struck the argent surface of an oval mirror and the mirror reflected only a naked nymph hovering in an otherwise empty and darkened chamber. The bed was untenanted and all within it undisturbed. No one had slept there. The naked nymph was a beauty woven into a tapestry that hung along the wall above the length of the bed, and the reclining nude watched over the deserted bedchamber. The gentle breeze rippled her fabric skin. She blindly observed that none of the toiletries on the dresser had been used or moved, that the bedcovers had not been turned down, and that the window casement was open to the night.

In another room, down the corridor another young girl in her bed was staring out of her own window, staring up at the moon, shivering in her scared skin and unable to go back to sleep. Outside, on the terrace, Marcilla stood quietly in the blue darkness. She was looking up to the house, looking up to Laura's room. The ghost of a smile was lilting upon her crimson lips, and a spot of blood stained the white bosom of her nightdress.

Chapter 4

Descending

In which Doctor Vordenburg examines Laura, and how her dreams intensify with terrifying rapidity.

It had all been so sudden, Laura's illness, the progression of a week, in which the young woman had grown pale and fragile and then utterly withdrawn. The lassitude had started not long after her birthday party, the night after in fact, culminating with the nightmares that woke the entire household with their chilling physicality and left Laura screaming and nervous. A few days later came the fatigue whenever Laura engaged in any activity. She found that she could not bear even a walk in the park and soon failed to descend from her room to dine. She declined conversation with her uncle and had even turned away an invitation from Carl. In the late afternoon of every day, their house guest, Marcilla, who kept her own peculiar hours, would emerge from her own chamber and go to Laura's room and sit with the invalid. Marcilla was the only person Laura would now admit into her room, nonetheless, even Marcilla, when questioned by the General, had commented that Laura looked pale and bloodless and that she was worried. This made the General especially uneasy about the girl in his charge, for he had already lost his brother to an unknown and lethal malaise and was frightened that history should repeat itself, visiting misfortune upon the brother's only daughter. Laura's wasting consumption had been so rapid and so alarming that despite the girl's wish that Doctor Vordenburg not be called, the General had summoned the physician on the fifth day, worried that he had already waited too long and that Laura may not recover her health.

Vordenburg had come just before lunch, although the General found his own appetite not apparent and his nerves somewhat rattled. Spielsdorf had invited the Doctor to the midday repast, an invitation that Vordenburg had happily accepted. There was no need for further inducement to eat at the General's table, especially when a veritable feast of fresh pink salmon and ripe fruits and sweet wine comprised the menu. Lunch at the village inn would have been palatable, Vordenburg mused to himself, but bland, so today he would discretely gorge his fill and eat like a hungry gourmand and drink some delicious brandy.

'It troubles me, Doctor Vordenburg,' said the General, his face drawn with this new and unwanted anxiety. 'The child seems to get weaker and weaker.'

He had confessed his apprehensions of a possible illness, a plague or similar malady that may be passing its pall over the country, but the Doctor had assured Spielsdorf that he knew of no such ailment or dangerous manifestation. Vordenburg, however, had not fully discounted the possibility of an unknown sickness and had asked the General if the girl had suffered from any specific symptoms, or unexpected changes in her health. He queried headaches or sudden diarrhoea and previously uncommon digestive disorders, but the General, as far as he knew, confessed that he did not know of any, but then he also admitted that he had been denied contact with his niece upon her own discretion. General Spielsdorf had wrestled with the problem for a few days and had thought it best that the Doctor were called. Disregarding Laura's unwillingness, the Doctor had briefly examined the ailing girl, and just as she had refused her uncle's questions about her health, so too did she adamantly refuse Vordenburg's clumsy examination of her body. To no avail.

Laura had ultimately, though resentfully agreed, and unveiled herself while her uncle waited in the room behind a silk screen. This waiting in her private space seemed unnecessary and embarrassing, and Laura had heard the man pacing back and forth behind the screen as he lingered. Although to Laura the screen hardly seemed barrier enough considering the invasive actions that followed. Under the duress of it all she allowed the Doctor to take her pulse and check her temperature. He wore a little circular magnifying glass on a silver chain about his neck and it was cold as it touched her breast when he stooped to listen to her heart. Disgustingly, he had appeared to quiver about the lips and his light blue eyes had sparkled weirdly as he gazed upon her exposed bosom. Lingeringly, his stare had travelled all over her body and Laura had felt humiliated and wanted to scream. Raising the ground glass to his vision seemed only further excuse for him to gloat, to prolong the moment, and peering through it into her eyes and her ears and down her throat was barely more than a pretext to ogle her naked skin. It was all quite horrible and had made her most uncomfortable, but she nonetheless availed herself of his impersonal examination, all the while protesting that she felt perfectly well and that she couldn't understand why all the fuss. Most certainly she had been a little tired, but surely that was natural, and no, she did not wish to see anyone, and she argued that withdrawing from exhaustion was normal too. The physician had asked whether she suffered from a shortness of breath, headaches or dizzy spells, had she been vomiting or had watery stools? He had also asked questions of an even more personal nature alluding to the young woman's menses at which Laura point had uttered her disgust. How horribly improper he was and rude and repulsive, and Laura narrowed her gaze and set her mouth into a tight, angry line. All the while she watched him with a distrusting eye.

At one point the Doctor stood aside and disappeared behind the screen and she heard him whispering to her uncle. She did not hear what was said but she resented that these men were treating her like a child, as if she were feeble and incapable of knowing the functions of her own body and unable to contain her emotions when she dared to question anything. Why did her uncle have to be in her room anyway and what was her monthly cycle to do with her feeling the way she did? It was terribly embarrassing when the Doctor had put his awful question to her, but when he had re-emerged from congress with the General he said that he needed to test for any congestion of the pelvis. Not knowing what that meant, Laura flinched violently when Vordenburg had abruptly placed his cold hand between her legs and felt her most private parts with the tips of his fingers. Well, that was too much. Laura had gasped and recoiled and swiftly pushed his hand away, but it was enough that his examination had proven her 'intact'. She felt humiliated and did not want to answer any more of his nauseating questions about her 'energies', 'hysterias' and 'instabilities', and she resented her uncle even more for allowing the man to set his unclean hands upon her. If only Marcilla were here now, surely, she would have stayed the Doctor's prying eyes and fumbling hand. He had made Laura squirm with discomfort and she wanted him out of her room. As he rinsed his hands in the washing bowl on her dresser, and as he dried them, he asked Laura about the bad dreams she had been having, but Laura did not reply, and instead she rolled over in her bed and faced away from him and looked to the far wall.

'Go away,' she groaned, suppressing a fit of tears, and although she hadn't intended them, the words slipped out of her mouth anyway.

The physician raised an eyebrow and smiled, telling her he was done for now and that she should rest. Exhausted after her trial, Laura closed her eyes and pulled the covers up about her bosom and within a few minutes she was asleep and both the Doctor and the General were momentarily forgotten. Before the veils of sudden sleep covered her, Laura did not even entertain one thought about Ebhardt.

The abrupt shift from ire to apathy seemed to concern the General more than it did the Doctor for the physician did not appear the least bit troubled. The General had a maid servant fold up the silk screen and pull the curtains to Laura's room, and he and Vordenburg retired to the drawing room. Following lunch, over a glass of brandy, they discussed Laura's condition

'Doctor Erich, don't you think it strange that this illness should come on so rapidly and leave her in such torpor?' asked the General. The Doctor sat in the drawing room and the General stood by, his face a mask of anxiety. They both contemplated the mystery of Laura's ill health.

'Over the last week she has become so unwell.'

The Doctor was now sitting comfortably in a cushioned chair that was far more elegant than any of the furniture in his tiny village accommodations. His room on the second floor across from the tavern was small, cramped and noisy. It provided him scant privacy to investigate his obsessions and he looked around with a little envy at the grand opulence on display, the paintings in gilded frames, the Persian carpets and the polished wooden furniture. Not to forget the fine Cognac, of course! For a moment Vordenburg enjoyed the luxury, it was not every day that one could take pleasure in such rich comforts. Not on his pitiful income. Upon this point he berated himself only a little, in that he had chosen to live in the wilds of the Austrian hinterland over the bustling metropolis of Vienna. Erich Vordenburg was fifty-nine years of age and the last twenty of those fifty-nine years had been spent in the Stirian wilds. He thought reflectively that if he had set up a practice in Vienna, long ago, he might have improved his pocket vastly, but he had settled instead for this isolated rural practice. When he had come to the region it had been difficult to gain acceptance and some of his city colleagues had said he had been foolish in taking a position in the uncultivated backwoods. However contrarily, he rather enjoyed the pastoral solitude, and as he was without wife or children, he lived mostly unto his own creed. Stiria provided a security of sorts from human expectation and there were certainly advantages in isolation. Sometimes it even provided the opportunity to pursue other branches of research that the scrutiny of large medical faculties did not allow, such as surgical and anatomical science and unorthodox chemistry. There were always those who could turn a blind eye to such fields of research, his local magistrates being no exception. Fees of course were generally incurred for the privilege, but such blindness needed to be watched carefully. No one could afford to be flippant.

In the uneducated there was always the possibility of primitive violence and misunderstanding, for superstition proved a breeding ground for one's own destruction. Sometimes it was best not to challenge the views of the brute but rather to bend and go with the flow. One only had to cite the recent problems encountered by that brilliant fellow Frankenstein, and the curse of popular but regressive thought considering his own scientific discoveries. Like that notorious Baron, Vordenburg had always been interested in natural history and more importantly in the biological and the forensic sciences. There was much to learn from the bodies of the deceased, and where this learning about the real world crossed into the dominion of the supernatural was most profoundly encountered in the opening of corpses. For Vordenburg, looking at the wonder of life from the inside of a deceased person, there was to be unlocked a whole new world of learning. Seeing into things that could not be seen with the naked eye was indeed a privilege, but it vexed the yokel. For Erich, this line of research had filled his mind with as much wonder as it must have awed the Baron Frankenstein. Backward thought, however, had declared that the evil of Frankenstein must be destroyed, and he had been hunted the length and breadth of Europe. The world had revolted against Frankenstein, so Vordenburg knew that in matters concerning the dead, that wherever he trod he must tread carefully.

Being a firm advocate for scientific advancement, Erich had purchased from an English catalogue a portable microscope. Of course, there were many other microscopes, but this was a portable Carey, a most noble and modern instrument that he could take with him wherever he went. How it had miraculously exposed the wondrous new world that lay hidden from the gaze of almost every man on earth with such amazing clarity. Gazing into its magnifying eye the Doctor could probe secretly into what lay hidden from normal view. Through the unblinking oculus of the microscope Vordenburg could glimpse tiny but obviously living things, things that twitched and swam in a universe concealed to the untrained vision. How wonderful were the revelations, in that they were unto sights laid open in another and completely different form of atmosphere, yet one so directly connected to the temporal existence as to be surely beyond the constraints of superstition. This instrument allowed one to behold the germ of life in all its glory, to behold the seeds that made up plant and animal and to reveal the true nature of all things, both large and small.

Science was certainly glorious and it pointed the way to understanding the mystery of nature, but every occasionally, peering into the microscope's objective lens, it was divulged unto Erich more anomalies and curiosities than he could ever explain. The microscope had changed his ideas about the medical causes of death, but its panoply was subjective. Why, it even asked that he ponder deeply the notion of size and its relevance to existence, and how even a ray of light could split and bend and have cause and effect. One day, upon a strange compulsion, Vordenburg had treated a soldier suffering from a wild distemper. With his skin covered in a scarlet rash, his eyes inflamed and in the throes of an agonising urethral discharge, the soldier was obviously poxed, and thus was his fever considered highly contagious. There was little Vordenburg had managed to do for the man but make up a tincturae from some crude herbs by dissolving them in alcohol. Then there had been the problem of getting the patient to swallow the solution, and considering his violent rages, that called for the application of tight restraints. The local constabulary had been required to carry out this task, and the man in his wild passions had struck many heavy blows to their bodies. Before he was constrained in a straight-jacket and dispatched to the Capital and to the dungeon of some dreadful hospital for the insane to waste away in madness and perish, the man had yielded under the administration of the Spiritus a sample of gleets that Vordenburg had afterward carefully examined with his microscope. It was both a horror and a fascination to see the pathology swimming on the sliver of thin glass, and to watch the arrangement of the contagional syphilis, to glimpse its tiny shape and form and to conjecture its wide and ghastly effect. These wriggling demons were the seed of madness. Was a cure possible? Vordenburg suspected there had to be a cure, but he plainly realised that mercury and other violently invasive treatments were vastly ineffective and even harmful. A less complicated treatment needed to be found; one that was administered into the body via the blood perhaps, for the blood flowed into every secret crevice of the body, did it not, spreading revitalisation in its wake? Of this he felt certain, and would it not be the wonder of all the medical world to astound those arrogant university professors if he were the mechanism through which such a grand discovery was made reality? Of course, he merely dreamed. He had none of the research facilities at his disposal that the great hospitals could resource and yet it seemed ridiculous that something as plainly biological as the pox was still treated by the establishment with abhorrence and ignorance as the work of the Devil.

Diseases transmitted through sex were provoking modern science to abandon superstition, but alas it was a difficult road to revelation. The Doctor had seen the mysterious essence of life squirming about in their tide of suppurating rhuem, terrible and yet gloriously beautiful, wonderful and yet lethal, and they demanded respect. These tiny organisms must be understood, for they were small but could kill most horribly, and they should not be disregarded as innocuous and inconsequential. Erich fundamentally understood that bacterium had the power to create and to destroy and were indeed a wonder of the natural order, as opposed to the dominion of the supernatural. Although their mechanisms to infect and kill could not be seen by the naked eye, for they were so tiny they worked upon a different scale of time as most people comprehended, there, under this magnifier, swimming in their bacterial cistern Erich was able to spy upon them, and to learn their secrets and to hope. Nonetheless he told none of his discoveries. It was still possible to lose your own life if you entertained heretical thoughts about the nature of nature in conflict with faith.

Moreover, Vordenburg had also wondered if there were things smaller still than these germs, things that his microscope could not detect. Now that was a truly fascinating thought! He would have love to test his theory but sadly he could not. No Carey microscope could yet unveil the hidden mysteries of existence. What was it that hid beyond this commonplace realm of life, a micro cosmos that was even smaller yet? That was an aspect of research that stirred up his brain to fevered pitch; for there were things that he wanted to explain to the many but found he did not know how. It was painfully obvious to Erich that the language to do so had not yet been invented and that left him exasperated and wanting. Few people heard the call of this language, and even fewer wanted to listen. Baron Frankenstein would have listened! That man knew there was important knowledge to be gleaned from the living, but so much more could be learned by an unprejudiced study of the dead. Of course, Erich knew that certain plants could be decocted into stimulants to aid sleep, to alleviate pain and for help with purging and adjusting the humours. These things were relevant if less than exciting, but how to glean the knowledge of higher things? The deceased harboured a wellspring of wisdom just waiting to be tapped, but instead the knowledge, locked up in the decomposing flesh, was more often cast into the cold, dark ground to rot and be lost. Yet there was also a need for caution if one were to pursue such science.

In a world where the physician was called upon to deal with scabs and wheals and pestiferous sores, of prescribing herbal remedies for grinding aches and running noses and outlandish treatments for the pox, people often baulked at the possibility of dissection. They were more likely to acquiesce to herbals that turned you into a somnambulist. The notion of a disturbed grave terrified them. When the gaze was directed within, well, people tended to revert to the impulse of fear. To fools the 'inside' was an ugly vision, to look upon heart and lung and liver and bowel. No one wanted to glimpse within the kingdom of the rotting flesh, where the blood no longer pulsed and where King Pest instead had set his seal. People so easily forgot that this was precisely how their 'god' had made them, fragile, destructible. Such devotion to imagination made no sense at all to Erich. Perhaps it was probably not as bad brewing up a foul-tasting herbal, but Vordenburg knew all too well that by that simple act alone it was enough for ignorance to consider you a witch and for them to call upon their god and destroy you.

These were still dark times. One had to be careful or they would hunt you down and string you up for meddling in things that profaned their God. Vordenburg told himself again and again that he did not ascribe to religious inclination and that the peasantry were fools, and yet his research had, at times, hesitated upon strange cross-roads. The microscope was evidence that seemed to refute the existence of god, but was it more sensible to live in a world of ignorance? In a world in which education versed the irrational, Erich recorded everything he learned in his books and kept copious notes on unusual cases. He was thankful that he would never have to explain his findings to any sceptical peers, simply because here fortunately, in the village of Karnstein, he had none. Nonetheless these findings often branched into the weird and the wonderful, where the natural appeared to become inextricably woven with the unnatural. In those cases, the Doctor recorded his findings as 'undetermined' because he firmly believed that eventually everything could have an explanation in science over religion, it just wasn't momentarily obvious. To believe in divine retribution made no sense to the Doctor. Here then was the grey area that he juggled inside his head, one that defied direct explanation, a place where science and religion locked swords and where superstition clashed with reality.

He recalled one case a few years back that had confused everyone, including his stoic irreligion, so much so that the Court had ruled it a murder suicide and closed the issue. A young man, the local artist, Bruno Heitz, had been found hanging from a corded rope suspended high up in a tree. The young man must have been extremely agile in his accomplishment, for how he had climbed so far up, almost six metres, was a mystery unto itself. However, there were other facts in the case that were just as baffling; his face had been horribly and inexplicably mutilated. The young man had been accused of murdering his sweetheart Sascha, the daughter of a local dignitary. It was all doubly horrific because the girl had been pregnant at the time of her murder, and this fact came to light only because Vordenburg had convinced the local authorities, and thus the dignitary and father of the female victim, to allow him to perform an autopsy. It had taken much persuading though, for this province, like other isolated provinces, was vehemently awash with superstitious belief and opposed to medical science. The provincials had stalled at Vordenburg's first suggestion to examine either the body of the young girl or that of her hanged amour. However, this did not surprise or phase Erich either, in fact Vordenburg found the fogs of false notion sometimes beneficial in that they conversely allowed him the liberty to investigate things his peers in Vienna could not. It was a difficult case, made worse because a new life had been forming in Sacha's belly. Was he going to cut the foetus up as well? Such a thing would have caused a moral outrage and Vordenburg would most surely have found persecution an unsympathetic deliverer of his own demise. Only his standing of many years in the local tight knit of the community went in his stead. He had argued that there was much to be learned from the dead and that perhaps the new life in the girl's womb might possibly even have contributed to her demise. Any new information that might be gleaned to clear Bruno's name could only be of help.

Vordenburg had pursued his case and cause and eventually the local magistrate had conceded, as Vordenburg knew he eventually would. If no one else outside of the village of Karnstein ever knew, Vordenburg might well be able to provide an answer through his investigations. Strangely though, Erich had found that in this case one of those anomalies he so dreaded was right under his nose; that there was snake venom in the young man's blood and that even the foetus in the girl's belly had begun, incredible as it sounded, to fossilise! Such a thing was impossible, or so Erich thought, and how did you tell the girl's father that her belly was becoming a lump of stone? There had been no accounting for that in the world of the rational... but upon reflection, those wounds on the artist's face... what had caused those? The mystery presented certain concrete facts that recalled to his mind the legends of the Gorgon from ancient Greece...

The golden light streaming through the great arched windows gave a warm wash to the polished timber surfaces of French lacquers and rich red upholstered velvets. The General was watching Vordenburg intently, the light glinting in his buckles and ornate buttons, and he was waiting patiently for a response that took some time in coming. The Doctor paused in his perplexed, reflective reverie, blinking it away as his twinkling light blue eyes met the General's. Those eyes seemed alive with some peculiar mischief that he would not share.

'Anaemia,' he said distractedly, a little too loudly and dismissively, addressing the General abruptly and shaking his bald head slightly. He had only been half-listening. Yes, that was it, Laura had lost too much blood due to her monthly cycle; there could be no other explanation. Although he had noted that Laura's blood circulation was slow, that she did present with a slightly accelerated respiration and that her pulse had decreased. She had gasped many times during his examination, but that might have been caused by the chill from his instruments, or even from his fingertips. The thought made him involuntarily lick his lips and a little thrill passed through his loins. He crossed his stocking clad legs as the thrill girded his loins, and his glacial eyes twitched almost perversely in his handsome face. Drily he delivered his diagnosis. 'They don't eat,' he continued, 'only think of their figures.'

Young girls were all the same, he had seen the behaviour before, many times. Their monthly cycle sometimes caused a collapse in their health and especially in their mental energies, limiting their physical resources and their flow of blood. Limiting their reason too! The lack of circulation made these girls delicate, and that was putting the fact mildly. In one small corner of his head it did occur to Vordenburg that he might be somewhat dismissive of Laura's illness, but it could hardly be anything other than female hysteria. He saw similar symptoms in many women, all the time, and having to diagnose such trivia bored him. Why, he had even seen attention-seeking damsels collapse into trance-like swoons that rendered them insensible. This house-call was no different to a hundred others, and Laura's hysteria provoked a sigh of tedium. Such was the female condition that it relied on wiles and deceits and clouded up men's senses with silly intrigues. Erich surely believed that his true calling was research, not house-calls. There was a breath of vision in research that was not to be had in having to deal with the stupid complaints of vapid teenage girls. Regardless, General Spielsdorf appeared unconvinced. He had not known his niece to previously complain by way of any illness, even when that time of the month came upon her. For one moment, he considered that he might have pushed his authority too far in asking Vordenburg to probe Laura's chastity. Yet upon reflection it was his right, and he had to be sure that young Ebhardt had not completely betrayed him, if betrayal was the skewer upon which propriety was pinioned. The General cast this foolish guilt aside and instead continued to ruminate that Laura was never ill, and it was strange to think of one so young in need of convalescence. It confused the General. He had hoped that the Doctor would diagnose the problem and put Laura back quickly on the road to recovery. He really had not the mind-set of late to concern himself with more problems, especially not irrelevant female problems. It was bad enough that he had consented to his young manager and Laura's marriage, all for the imprudent notion that such a union would bind everyone together in an unbreakable bond... and keep Ebhardt close. The General was not convinced that the Doctor was correct in his trite dismissal of Laura's symptoms.

'It is common with young girls, sir, I assure you and a few old ones too!' the Doctor added wryly, almost laughing aloud at his own vile humour.

'Disgusting,' thought the General, as the image of an old woman flashed into his mind's vision, moles and hairy upper lip, sagging breasts and wafting female scents, wrinkles and all. He had never, till this moment even imagined such a repulsive thing.

The physician beamed and nodded as if he knew exactly what the General was thinking, and took another sip of the excellent brandy. He wanted to savour the liquor for as long as he could for it was so much better than the poison they served at the local tavern and it may be a long time before he had the opportunity to taste such a fine drop again. Not that abstinence was his chosen lot.

'Tell me Erich, what causes these dreadful nightmares she keeps having?' Could the Doctor provide a reasonable answer for that? The dreams were growing in intensity and Laura was always more ill after a night of terrible dreams. The screaming put the whole of the household in disarray and it was happening now almost every night. It could not be allowed to go on for it had begun to shred everyone's nerves. Swallowing the last of his brandy, Vordenburg placed the empty glass on the gadrooned tray beside the decanter. For a short moment, he stared longingly at the cognac bottle and the amber liquid tempted him to another, but he resisted.

'Body weakens,' Erich suggested, 'mind gets active.' Here he raised a hand up to his temple and made some quick loops with his fingers in the air. Laura's female scents lingered on his fingertips and his hand hovered ever so briefly beneath his twitching nostrils. He breathed in deeply but tried not to be obvious, and the General looked at him and his eyebrows furrowed. Observing the military man's reaction, Erich scoffed inwardly as he smoothed out the bristles of his white moustache. Obviously, the General was not listening to anything he said. Perhaps if it made the man feel better he could resort to superstition for a cure and burn some incense, recommend the girl be bathed in goat's urine or apply a leech or two. As there were no plague victims about he could not suggest the poor girl drink some pus squeezed from a bubo. Would that make the General, if not Laura, feel better? Vordenburg almost laughed aloud at how ridiculous the peasant remedies were. To the physician, the General had always been a degree somewhat rodomontade, and that under the glitter of the golden buttons and shining epaulets was little that characterised substance or even reality. In fact, the Doctor harboured suspicions that the General's medals were superficial awards rather than merits won in battle, and who was he in any case to put forth an opinion about medical conditions? Too, there were the rumours about what the General preferred in his bed... Contrarily the General felt vaguely insulted that the Doctor should think his ward was losing her mind. She had displayed no such symptoms previously, so why the abrupt change in her health? The physician, despite his diagnosis was not filling the General's heart with much confidence.

'She needs some iron, that's all,' said Vordenburg emphatically. 'Green stuffs, red meat. Put some blood back into her!'

Isolation in this place had obviously made the poor child bloodless in more ways than one. The General put down his own cognac and looked to the floor, thinking how ridiculous it sounded that he should have to slaughter a cow and get cook to pick some beans and radicchio, and that was surely all it would take to make everything better! The whole business of Laura's illness was exasperating. He felt cross and this caused his conscience to begin to weigh heavy upon his mind. His expression made his face sag like a tired mask. These things the physician told him, they were of no help at all.

'A drop of Port, perhaps, at night?' suggested the Doctor. Briskly he pushed back his chair from the little table, realising that there was barely more he could add to that which he had already said. He stood up and walked over to another table by the entrance of the room to collect his hat, black cloak, gloves and medical bag.

'Well, Erich,' said the General, 'I'm glad you don't regard it as too serious a matter.' However, the General was not at all to be consoled and he took little solace from the Doctor's simplistic diagnosis. He did not know what would restore Laura's health let alone her spirit and this caused the gentleman an unpleasant fear, doubt and anxiety. Something, some ill portent told him that his niece was descending and he could not be convinced otherwise.

'She'll be all right,' the Doctor reassured. 'I'll ride over again in a day or two.'

'I'd be grateful,' the General told him, even though he was not certain that his words were true.

They walked to the front door and passed through the great columns and down the marble steps. There Erich hauled himself up upon his horse. The steed stamped impatiently at the ground and shook its mane.

'All right, Jupiter,' said he, patting the animal's neck with a gentle, pacifying stroke. He saluted the General good day as he righted himself in the saddle and tapped his heels gently into the horse's flank.

'Goodbye, Doctor, and thank you,' General Spielsdorf called after as the physician placed his tall black hat upon his mostly bald head and rode up the neatly raked carriage road, leaving the General to stand like one abandoned at the great entrance of his great house.

Etiolated sunlight filtered in between the curtains and it washed over the carpet and made faded variegations of green and blue upon the bedroom wall and the high moulded ceiling. From Laura's window Marcilla looked down into the carriageway. She had come from her room when the Doctor had finished examining Laura over an hour ago. The beautiful visitor had let herself into Laura's bedroom unobserved and she had taken a post at the window, her right hand raised, her slim fingers holding the drapery partly aside so that her view was unobstructed. There she had remained, still as a statue, looking out as the sun began its liquid gold descent from a powder blue sky. The light glanced pale off the sculpted marble skin of her cheek, made her lips a deep and dark and voluptuous red bow. Across the park and beyond the forest the mountain vista was a darker shade of glaucous blue, the light streaking shadows upon the grey-green tree trunks. The world was closing for the day. Laura tossed about in her bed, moaning lowly in her fitful slumbers and thus she had not heard the other girl come into her room. Marcilla did not wake her, but stood sentinel beside the window.

From somewhere in the house, perhaps from the great hall, a clock chimed the hour of three and then four and the reverberating echoes called mournfully through the mansion's vast rooms. Marcilla had watched the Doctor climb upon his horse and ride away and as she watched the man depart her face momentarily had become a mask of hate and fury. Marcilla had also watched as General Spielsdorf paused upon the edge of his marble entrance, her only movement was to release the curtain she held back and slowly lower her hand. The man cast his eye up to the high semi-circular arch of his niece's window. For a strange and most unsettling moment the General had imagined that there was a shape in the glass, a shape trapped within the reflections of sunlight, the vision of something that resembled vast wings. Those wings were unfolding, black and darkling, bejewelled in the final and lingering sparks of the dying day. The vision was obscure and it shifted and then passed into phantasy, as if it had been fashioned for his eye alone, and from illusion. It must have been the reflection of the clouds rippling in the surface of the glass, for the vault empyrean was changing from blue to grape and into violet. The last of the burning star's golden rays filled up his eyes and blurred the General's vision. Yes, wings, like some hideous and fanciful beast from mythic lore! The man felt a shudder slide coldly up his spine.

The General raised a hand to his brow to better his focus. From her high post Marcilla had smiled enigmatically but she did not take a step away from behind the lace and velvet. She knew that from where the General stood he could not see her, that he was blinded. Oh, so blind! Laura woke and yawned, and as she opened her eyes she beheld her beautiful new friend standing vigil by the window, and her face lit up like a lantern in the shadows, and she smiled. Marcilla turned from the window at the sound of Laura's sighs and crossed languidly to the girl's bedside. With effort Laura moved higher in her bed, into a sitting position, stirring the pearly sheeting into foaming waves. She leaned back upon her pillows, but even this small movement made her ache with the strain. Yet Marcilla was there to make everything all right.

'Oh, Marcilla,' said she, although her voice hardly registered above a whisper, 'you're so kind to me.'

Laura's blue eyes were no longer the colour of cornflowers but had taken on a rather dull and lustreless opacity. She hardly even blinked as she gazed at her friend, entranced by her beauty. Only Marcilla understood how she felt, unlike those repulsive men who ogled her flesh and were indecent. She reached weakly out toward her companion and Marcilla sat softly beside her on the bed. The beautiful girl enfolded an arm about Laura's slim form. Laura was upon the brink of telling her new friend about the indignities that had occurred, but Marcilla raised a finger up to Laura's mouth and traced its tip over the curve of her lips. Laura sighed and smiled. She realised she did not have to tell Marcilla anything because Marcilla was wise to the workings of the world. Marcilla understood everything, she knew somehow the awful dealings of those men and she need not speak her thoughts aloud. She held Laura gently.

'I swear I shall die when you leave,' Laura said at length, and she wished that Marcilla would never go away but stay with her always. Young Carl Ebhardt was but an eidolon now and she seemed hardly even to recall his name. He was no handsome Grecian god, no handsome soldier anymore; no hero who could have commanded her heart. Even Perseus in his fight for Andromeda's love was merely a painter's brush strokes on the vast canvas in the ballroom; Perseus' quest of the young female flesh was redundant and no longer relevant, despite the looming shadow of the sea monster. The hero's valour against the monster was as nothing if not recondite, for he could never hope to loosen the chains that really bound the heart. Here and now there was only Marcilla, beautiful, beautiful Marcilla. Ebhardt and her uncle were simply men whose desires were as remote and irrelevant as were the distant, myths of ancient times. Marcilla held her friend closely and stroked her cheek. Laura was captivated and smiled in devotion. She adored how Marcilla's friendship had grown in the short space of her visit. Laura never ceased to marvel at Marcilla's exquisite face and at the depth of her affection. The girl was forever calm and serene and yet she gave the impression of strength and of worldliness, of knowing things that Laura could not ever know, of having journeyed long in the wide world. It was as if Marcilla knew the deepest of all the mysteries, felt the most profound of all emotions, of this truth Laura felt certain. Marcilla was there whenever she needed her, and it was so wonderful that the lovely stranger had come into her life, and how her life had changed irrevocably. Laura had lived in a veiled darkness, but Marcilla had woken up Laura's mind, woken up her emotions, and awoken her soul. Since her sudden illness the beautiful girl had been by her side the whole time, and it did not matter that ultimately Laura knew virtually nothing about Marcilla.

'Why,' and the sudden thought made Laura speak the words unintentionally aloud, 'I don't know your family name, where you come from or even how old you are!' Though it really did not matter, for whoever Marcilla was and from wherever she hailed, and that must have been surely from the most astonishing dream, all that was relevant now was that she was here, with Laura, to hold her and to love her.

Marcilla simply smiled. 'Does any of that matter?' she asked of her feeble companion. Laura shook her head with a sigh, half ashamed that she should have solicited such a question.

'I shall never leave you, my dearest Laura' promised Marcilla, and she was so close and warm, leaning forward and placing a warm but gentle kiss upon the other girl's lips. The kiss was a prophecy of the love that the doomed alone shared, a feverish and yet wonderful yearning that contradicted Laura's silly adolescent desires for Carl Ebhardt. With merely a touch Marcilla consoled and soothed and raptured the soul, and brushed the vitality of the young man aside. As Marcilla kissed Laura she brushed the girl's golden tresses away from her pale cheek, away from her white throat and from off her tumultuous bosom. Laura took in a sharp breath and felt her heart skip a beat. That heart was a 'flutter like trapped moth whose velvet wings flapped frantically against the glass that shielded the flame of the burning lamp. Marcilla broke the kiss and stared into Laura's eyes. Lost in those eyes Laura felt the most peculiar of sensations, that she wanted Marcilla's kiss to never end, that she needed her embrace to hold her tight till all eternity should pass. It was an embrace that she felt she could not do without and it would kill her if she let go. Marcilla was a song made flesh, her face a singular star that glowed as a beacon glows to guide the soul gently from the travails of foolish love and foolish sorrow into a wonderful and glorious enchantment. Laura groaned and turned her head to the side. The beating of her heart banged away within her chest, it was like a hammer, violent and thunderous. Marcilla bowed her lovely head and her auburn hair fell in a tide about Laura's face till the maiden thought she should die of a wonderful suffocation. The pendulous ruby the stranger wore about her neck brushed against Laura's bosom with a cold yet burning fire. That fire melted into Laura's flesh, all the way through to her pounding heart.

Gracefully Marcilla's lips made a slow and lazy descent, sliding like velvet over her companion's chin and neck till at last they came to rest upon the almond sliver of the girl's shoulder. Exquisite was the touch of those lips, and as they settled upon Laura's bare skin the moth shuddered madly in the suffused afternoon light. Marcilla's fingers curled about Laura's left breast. Gently she stroked the nipple under the lace of the young woman's nightdress. Laura gasped and her nipple hardened, red like a tight new rosebud, precipitating a wave of ultimate pleasure. The glint in Marcilla's fiery jewel blinked out and the moth beat its wings into perdition, shedding a cascade of glittering scales in the cup of the hand that caught its flight. Laura swooned into a dreamy idyll, one of a passionate and voluptuous agony that took her again down into a glorious and all-consuming darkness.

Carl had taken a twisting path through the forest, keeping his horse to a gentle canter. He had woken with a thought, one that he needed to investigate, for his peace of mind and for that of the General, and for Laura's sake. He had tossed the verity of his destination over in his head, partly because his heart deftly understood that his position in the General's household now faced an unwelcome and formidable rival. That rival wore its own disguise, a beguiling and beautiful face, but it concealed a dark light and had attached itself to the young woman that Carl thought to marry. On the surface of the issue his suspicions might have appeared trite and somewhat hypocritically distasteful, and Laura the pawn in a game of deceit, but its suggestion rang with the echo of a presupposed threat that reverberated emphatically about the chambers of his emotions and his manhood. He did not wish to lose his hopes for a share of the General's fortunes, although Carl's own heart was twisting in all the wrong directions and his fortunes were not changing in the way that he intended. There was the future at stake and the surety of that future went beyond the trivial longings of the flesh. Marriage to estate was a good chance to make good and as a husband he did not think he would fail. In his heart, he loved Laura. It was an emotion that had come out of nowhere and one that he thought he would never feel. Nevertheless, he did feel it, and now certain aspects of his life of course would have to change. This beautiful stranger, Marcilla, had brought with her the seed of trouble when she had arrived, a troubled that seemed to mirror his own entanglements, and that seed had begun to flower so quickly that it had taken him quite by surprise. Carl could not help but feel somehow threatened by the beautiful stranger. However, Carl sensed that the rivalry was somehow beyond the flesh, that there was something else at work here that he failed to grasp. The notion would not let go of his thoughts.

Ebhardt rode north-west and after about half an hour of passing between sunshine and shadow, he rode at length alongside acres of fallow fields and came upon the burned-out skeleton of an old mill. The structure had half-collapsed into rubble. Its vanes were bent and black like great broken fingers. Ebhardt halted his mount and stared at the great broken spur of the fallen wheel; a streamlet flowing from a mountain lake fed the millpond, and there on the surface of the water bloomed purple hyacinth. Some said that it was here, in this mill, where the bones of two young women had been discovered, or at least what was left of those bones. The stories told inferred most of those bones had been ground to powder under the grinding stone of this mill, but unto what purpose remained somewhat vague. It was rumoured that the perpetrator of this unspeakable and heinous act was the estranged son of the noblewoman who owned the castle in the lea, but it was not known who had burned the mill to the ground. No one would ever know the truth and none of the exact details had ever been verified. The ruined mill was now said to be haunted. A blackened, shattered structure, it sat upstream from Ebhardt's destination, the Baroness Meister's old house situated just beyond the forest, over the crest of the delta. Carl spurred his horse onward from the mill and a few moments later he was standing on the hilltop looking down, his view following the stream. He tethered the horse's reins to a low hanging branch and the grey-dappled mare cropped the grass and rested after her ride, and Carl walked the short distance to his destination.

The residence he came upon stood in a low campestrian basin, surrounded by a moat upon which white swans drifted. The stream that had flowed into the millpond also fed this moat, snaking between glade and forest from a high summit lake. The water in the culvert was crystal clear, cold and fresh and perch with glinting scales darted under the lily pads. Everything appeared glorious, pretty, like a picture. Ancient was the abode, not so much a house but rather the remnants of a keep that had stood on the site for possibly all these last six hundred years with various renovations and alterations added to it over those passing years. It had a peculiar aspect that bespoke of neither home nor stronghold. The morning sunlight shone above its towers, making black hollows of its windows and a shadowy cavern beyond its open and rusted portcullis. The building did not truly dominate its position in the landscape. Not that it lacked grandeur, but because of its confused architecture and its lower position, squatting within the landscape. Castles were usually built on high ground and this one was not. This strange fact alone reflected its ambivalence. Had it been constructed for defence or as a home? There was no real way of answering the question as the structure's history was so vague. It was not an excessively large building, not if one compared it to General Spielsdorf's palace, but it was strangely formidable, sitting low on the open plain and beyond the belt of the woods, its entrance across the dilapidated span of a drawbridge. There were four symmetrical flanking towers that were not exceedingly high either, but its walls were massy and solid, their rectangular continuity broken by pilaster buttresses that were neither spectacular nor decorative. That it appeared picturesque at all was somehow illusory, partly because of its reflection in the moat. As a feudal tenure, it had once perhaps served as a domicile for the lord during rest from duty and it was difficult to consider it for little other function or purpose. The squat structure was sparse by way of fortification or defence and now only weeds poked through the stones. Ivy had grown in interlaced knots along the walls, covering stone and ashlars and it reached upward towards the lightning rods. Strangely the ivy was withered and brown.

The Baroness Meinster who had lived here had died in mysterious circumstances some years ago, and it was rumoured that her death had been at the hand of her son. Her mutilated corpse had been found laid out upon a velvet bier, but the son had not been found, he had disappeared. The details of her mutilation were rather gruesome and had become exaggerated over time; sharp objects had been driven into her flesh, into her hands, her breasts and between her thighs and a spike had been skewered into her anus... her tongue torn out her... The stories that had grown up around the incident of the woman's murder became even more embellished and elaborately horrific as the years had passed. Some whispered of the Devil's agency in the deed, others that the son had been a sick and deranged pervert involved in an incestuous relationship with his mother. Upstairs in what must have been his bedroom it was said there were chains and manacles riveted to the wall, and phallic objects of various sizes and other twisted and disgusting paraphernalia. Talk had supposed that the fetters were fashioned from pure silver and that the Baroness had held her son captive in that room and performed upon him unspeakable depravities. It might have been some sick and fetishist Oedipus game if any of it were grounded in truth. There had been rife gossip that the son had been corrupted in his travels abroad, that his youth had been defiled and the remnants of his soul sadistically knotted up by some vile perversion. There were horrible parallels here to the psychotic Transylvanian warlord, Vlad Țepeș, if one wanted to look at the history from an even more revolting aspect. Abduction, paedophiliac rape, torture, sadism... The list could go on and on, but it seemed certain, to satiate her own familial desires, the mother had unwittingly set in motion the machinery that would lead to her brutal death. All of this had been linked to the business at the mill with the blackened skeletal remains of two young women, yet how that was connected was a mystery unsolved. No one ever come forward to talk, but it was speculated that they had absconded from or been abducted from a nearby finishing school for young ladies, and they too had met their fates at the vile hands of the Baroness's depraved son. Folk believed it was he who had set fire to the mill to conceal the heinous crimes.

The great house had eventually fallen into the hands of the Baroness's legal representatives because no living relative could be found. Thus, of this it had remained untenanted for quite some years and had fallen into disrepair. No one seemed interested in acquiring the estate and no one ever went there. It was an abandoned property, the domicile of owls and stray cats, of spiders and rats. It was certainly news that the place had people living in it again. All of this was years ago, and Ebhardt would never know if the tale even contained a grain of truth. Kurt, the landlord would attest that the story was true, although that man veered close to the edge of hysteria, to be sure! Despite laughing at old Kurt, Carl could not help but feel a sense of foreboding as he passed over the rotting drawbridge and through the gatehouse into the derelict courtyard. There he stood, glancing about and not knowing exactly what he expected to find, if anything.

For a moment Ebhardt contemplated entering the chateau, to find the infamous room of rape and torture and the silver shackles, but he could not bring himself to do that. As no one had hailed his arrival Carl did not bother to call out because, as he had rightly suspected, the house had long been empty. He had realised that the mysterious Countess, Marcilla's mother, if she had really purchased the residence, did not live in it at all, yet why the subterfuge? She had accepted the General's invitation to Laura's birthday party after having sent a messenger in her stead to acknowledge her move into the neighbouring estate. It had, of course, come as a surprise to the General that anyone would have purchased that piece of real estate, especially as it was attached to no arable farming land or agriculture aside from the derelict mill. The fields had long ceased to yield wheat for flour and most had returned to copse and forest. As a holiday home it was particularly unsuitable, requiring an excessive amount of funds to make the repairs necessary to bring it up to a habitable standard. Carl looked upwards to the broken windows and squinted as the morning light glanced from their coloured slivers, throwing pale but jagged rainbows upon the buckled flagstones. Up there had been the bedroom where the Baroness had locked up her son in those silver chains. Maybe there was something hideously like the Baroness Meinster and the mysterious Countess, a reminder, perhaps of an unspeakable secret lay at the core of them both. Why did Carl not trust Marcilla? Was he so obviously envious of her that the resentment flaring away in his soul had turned Laura to rejecting his favour? He told himself how irrational his emotions were, especially when he hardly even knew the house guest. Still, that was her mystery after all, the unfathomable and the dangerous, and Carl only smiled contemptuously at this thought for he was not going to let his fears destroy his tenuous future. Yes, it was true, Marcilla angered him on some unspeakably hostile level, but he did not know what to do about the stranger.

The Doctor could not understand Laura's illness, sudden as it had been, and the General was beside himself with fear and guilt. Ebhardt wondered how much of all this concern was based on fears that the General's idyll should be discovered and his respectability come undone. It had all come about so suddenly and had thrown everything, all his plans of kilter. Ultimately there was Marcilla, remote and haughty, beautiful and mysterious, the symbol of the unknowable, the sylph who did not descend from her room till late in the day, and she had moved so close to Laura in such a short space of time. A weird and inexplicable darkness had entered all their lives, and a jealousy. Now, this place was redolent with soundless echoes, and the desolation of the Baroness Meinster's castle had piqued his curiosity, but Carl was hardly satisfied. When he returned to the General's house he would tell the man what he had discovered and then the General would need to question his beautiful guest. Yet even once he did, how could the equilibrium of life ever be properly restored?

Late that afternoon Ebhardt reined his mare to a halt and jumped down from the saddle. He walked the horse to a groom, who took the bridle and led the mare to water and feed. The General was standing on the steps of his house.

'I have been to the Bullheimer's farm, sir, and the new barn is ready for use.' The Bullheimer's were tenants who farmed dairy cattle on the higher pastures. The family produced their own delicious Graukäse, and the milk provided for all the dairy products that graced the General's table, and for a good deal that was traded in the local town market. Ebhardt had been supervising the barn's construction, but even this preoccupation had not diffused his thoughts of Laura. He had asked to see her a few days earlier and he had been denied. The refusal had come from Laura herself and the words had oddly wounded Carl's pride. This request by the young man to see Laura had only further bewildered the General, and so the wheel of guilt and confusion made another revolution and spun even more unhappiness over the estate. The General signalled a greeting to Carl with a slight raise of the hand but he did not smile. It seemed little would induce a smile now. The weather was beginning to change and it was as if the colder season were etching itself into the emotional cold within both men. The Bullheimer barn had been erected just in time, as a haven for the cattle during the snowy months, but such things did not entirely interest the General. The General maintained his severe and unhappy countenance; Ebhardt's face was likewise painted with concern. A gust of chill breath rippled over the wide stone steps and pulled at Ebhardt's riding cloak, a brittle leaf stuck in its folds.

'Good, good,' replied the General and he turned away distractedly. He appeared remote and began to return inside, almost dismissing young Ebhardt without any further words, without really having said anything at all. Carl flinched. This seemed so out of character for General Spielsdorf, and it hurt some place inside Carl's heart. He arrested the General's flight with an abrupt question.

'How is Laura, Sir?'

The General paused, his expression set in stone, his fists clenching up in futile imprecation. It looked as if he were grinding his teeth. His face wore a mask of suppressed anger.

'May I see her?'

Ebhardt could almost hear the General accusing him of wanting his cake and to eat it too, but Carl had moved beyond that now.

'No,' remarked the older man and Ebhardt cast his glance to the ground. He did not want to look the General in the face but he had not seen Laura for a week now and by report he had been told she was ill, gravely ill. If only he were permitted to go to her, to see her, he would take her hand and stroke her silken cheek and for certain she would respond. If anything were to happen to Laura and he not be permitted to see her... Like a weird and black cloud, he could not stem bad thoughts from rising in his mind. Likewise, the General could not hide his own anxieties. General Spielsdorf turned back and stared into Carl's face, shaking his worried head. He had opened a nest of problems, and all because of desire. No real thought regarding the feelings and the pain that this ménage had created had been spared for the girl who now lay sick in her bed upstairs.

'No,' he said lowering his tone a little and walking down the steps to stand opposite his young manager. 'I don't understand her. She doesn't really want to see anyone except...'

The name froze up in his mouth and refused to leave his tongue. If he said the appellation aloud the General knew the unhealthy and hypocritical implication it would arouse.

'Marcilla?' Ebhardt spoke the girl's name because the General could not, and he could not suppress the resentment that spilled forth from the well of his throat, that stung his tongue and burned his lips. The old man blanched. A spark of fury lit the inner depths of the General's eyes, the fading beams of the close of day igniting his anger to a red and vehement glow. The General's lips drew into a thin line, pulling in his cheeks so that he looked almost cadaverous.

'Yes,' he almost spat the affirmative out as if it were poison. Some part of the General's soul hated the beautiful stranger, loathed and despised her despite her graceful demeanour and her lovely, seductive exterior. There was something under that alabaster skin, the General did not know what, but he connected the arrival of Marcilla into his home with the wasting malady that now afflicted his niece. He also suspected that his lovely house guest contained within her core the seed of his own undoing; that she knew his secrets and in his paranoia, he hated her even more.

'Marcilla seems devoted to her,' said Ebhardt, the statement ringing with the sting of spite.

General Spielsdorf could barely mask the look of confusion that tore across his features. It was a sick accusation, sounded as if the bell of doom had rung its peal in his ears, and that doom was spelled for all of them, clear and strident and foolish in their duplicitous deceits. At present, he did not want to think about the foul implications of it all. He could hardly confess the possibility of any filthy accusation about the purity of his niece, especially in the light of his own proclivities, but he did not feel the same for Marcilla. That girl was worldly, some would say sophisticated while others would say degenerate, but if anything, she was something other than what she appeared, he was sure of that. On several occasions, she had looked upon him with a strange and austere gaze and run her cold blue eyes all the way over his body as if she were mapping his frame and seeking for fissures in its surface. She did not have to say anything to him, for the General knew instinctively that Marcilla understood him more than any words she might articulate. The truth of it was that she said so little to anyone. She conveyed most of her verbal conversations only to Laura and when she spoke directly to the General, and though her words were minimal, her form spoke plenty. Nonetheless she was a 'fire with a most confident body language, lithe like a serpent, beautiful and dangerous, wise beyond her twenty odd years. Her form challenged others to rise against her and the awful reality in this was that she did not know the General at all, how could she have known him? But she knew his interior, that was beyond doubt and that was disturbing, for it made the General question himself and to trip up like a staggering fool.

What made him think she knew of his love for Carl? He had thought this thing just the other afternoon, not long after she had descended from her room and had refused afternoon tea. Their conversation had been brief and she was going up to see how Laura was feeling. Her eyes had arrested the General's when he had suggested that she should leave his niece to rest alone. Her look had seemed to penetrate his soul, to challenge him, to mock his feeble authority. The General had stumbled at the post and knew that here was a power he had never anticipated. Wordlessly Marcilla had slid past him, ignoring him as if he hardly mattered, hardly existed, rising like a storm cloud on the step above him. She had paused and looked down upon him, the General defeated before the battle had even begun and then with a leer she had walked slowly and deliberately up the remaining stairs. General Spielsdorf could only watch on mutely quivering in fury as he beheld the shape of her flesh shimmering under the gossamer fabric of her gown. Upon the gallery she had paused again, timing her step deliberately, but she did not turn back to look at him. This refusal to look bespoke a subtle recognition of power that had made the General shiver, and Marcilla had moved along the gallery, one slow step at a time as if she were drawing out his impotent choler and enjoying the unspoken power she had over him. Uncertain as to what had happened to his authority, the General stood frozen until Marcilla had shut herself up in Laura's bedroom, leaving the man to deliberate his own sullied mistrustful conscience and to leave her well enough alone. The General's mind had begun to come apart at that same moment. Was he simply imaging this feat of prophecy she seemed to project, that should he challenge her he would pay dearly? Was he being unreasonable and how could one person, no, how could one young woman affect such power over him, he who had commanded armies? Was this all a vile trickery or was it just in his imagination?

'Nevertheless,' he said to Carl, and his words were hard-edged and resolute, 'I shall be glad when the Countess comes back for her!'

'It seems strange, sir, does it not, that the Countess has not yet come back for her daughter and neither has she sent word of her intentions? Who knows where she has gone and for how long? One fears that something might have happened...'

'Please, Carl, tell me something that I do not already know,' snapped the General sharply. 'Do you think that her whereabouts does not plague me both day and night? That I do not constantly berate myself for being so foolish as to not even ask their name or where they were going? Why, I do not even know where to begin looking for her!'

Carl's expression only emphasised his notion of the General's embarrassing and impetuous foolishness in this matter.

'Have you asked Marcilla?'

'Do you think me a greater fool?' the General groaned. 'The girl protests when asked anything about her family. She is deliberately obtuse and only vaguely intimates that her mother's 'dear friend' resides somewhere in Moravia, but the details of where exactly are at best sketchy, and Marcilla is always so evasive. Whenever I broach the subject Marcilla deliberately changes the tact as to be of no help at all. Why, the last time I inquired, she seemed to earnestly express a yearning desire to go home but I am not convinced that she was at all sincere! Now she does not even speak to me. I have grown to distrust the girl and I do not like her, and I want her gone from my house. I wish I had never agreed to take her into my care. However, I feel certain that her home is not the old Baroness's house. To declare they reside in that ruin is a deception. There is something strange and frightening about that girl. I have taken the liberty of writing to an old army friend of mine who does reside in Moravia, Baron Hartog. He has connections and we will see if he can shed any light upon the mystery of these people.'

The General turned away, biting his lip for he could not know what should be done. The power to do anything was beyond him now, and maybe even beyond anything that anyone could do. As the twilight seeped its mauve light into violet and choked the failing day into night, General Spielsdorf cursed and strode inside and Carl was left to stand upon the empty portico in the cold afternoon wind and pray that some deity would see everything to right. Inside his immense house, the General had begun pacing about the vast emptiness of his ballroom. He was the shadow creature pacing now, in the dark, closed in by the caged walls of his own desires. There were no party guests sharing happiness and celebration, dancing and twirling about Perseus and Andromeda, for now it was a space that only echoed with the infamy of the General's own undoing. He looked upon the towering painting and for a short moment his eye followed the hero's line and form on the canvas. Perseus was beautiful, ripe with bursting youth and full of the favour of the gods, and in his hand, he held the Gorgon's severed head, the symbol of defeated female power. That symbol was jarring in that it explicitly confirmed his barely concealed misogyny, but if that is what he had to do to be rid of Marcilla, to cut off her head, then he would do it! Marcilla did not belong in the General's world. The flesh of woman had the power to turn a man to stone if it was given hideous freedom. Female flesh would drain away your vital essences and leave you brittle, and that was the reason why the Gorgon's head was severed. Oh, young Ebhardt had been smitten too, doomed! Man should not allow a woman to control him, not ever. That idea was wrong and unthinkable, untenable.

It was now unbelievable that Marcilla should be controlling the General's household, controlling his mind. Like Perseus, Carl had been given whatever power he now thought he possessed, but power was fleeting and the hero was yet to fight for the imperiled heroine. As is the truth of the hero's quest, Carl had not really come upon that power by his own stead; the General had provided all the weapons including the lovely Andromeda, chained to the rock, threatened by the monster. Could Perseus really save her by closing his real emotions and causing the world to turn into stone around him as if it did not matter? Was Carl really that unfeeling? General Spielsdorf did not have the answer to any of this, but he knew that Marcilla, strong, mysterious and as willful as a woman should not be, could prove the undoing of them all. Bringing the young man here to be with him might have ultimately amounted to naught, the stuff of a vain and idyllic dream, and the General would be left with nothing. Marcilla would see to that. There had been so much life to be had, so much love to be sampled, or so he had presumed and now there was only the dull echo of ironic laughter and of unhappiness, the ghosts of lust and the presence of the female Devil in the flesh.

He was painfully aware that the repetitive sound of his own footsteps echoed a portent that trod Laura closer and closer to the cortege of her doom. Now his guilt over Carl, and for Laura's wellbeing, for her young life, was confusing his heart and his head. Every moment of indecision took the young woman nearer and nearer to death. There was one other here though whose mystery he felt he could, he must unravel, and he would breach the sanctity of Marcilla's room to do just that, for he could not take the strain of it any longer. There was something terribly connective to that legend of the Gorgon's head of writhing snakes and men turned to stone that linked the lovely girl who lurked upstairs to the present horror that had crept into their lives. Marcilla, she who always hid in the shadows of the room at the end of the corridor and who only came out in the eve, the one and only person that Laura would see, rejecting all others. The General had begun to suspect that under Marcilla's beautiful skin festered the Gorgon's ugliness. General Spielsdorf had grown into this suspicion and his doubts had evolved into a horrible metaphor. Who was she and what was she? Marcilla, mysterious and enigmatic was no less playing the cipher, the catalyst that had brought about the abrupt changes to this world, this estate, and the General's love even! With the catalyst came the dreaded implication that Ebhardt had turned his own heart to stone, turned against the General for a mere girl, his own niece, but even in that the General still knew something else. He had to know the truth even if it proclaimed his own ruin. He would force Marcilla to tell him that truth, although he was unsure just how he was going to accomplish that feat.

The General did not see Marcilla that evening and as the night enveloped the mansion so fled his courage and the battlefield lay strewn with subservience and antipathy. So much for his prowess in battle that he found the slip of a girl daunting in the extreme and concerns about his niece's safety and wellbeing became a secondary afterthought following his love for Ebhardt. Courage having deserted the commander, love was failing too. Had that failing been only recent, or had it been brooding over the years of their friendship? The General did not like to think of the young man as mercenary, that couldn't be true. He had always spoiled Ebhardt and treated him, and he thought that Carl reciprocated his feelings. What had changed and when had it changed? Perhaps he was simply a blind old fool whose gleaming medals and years of service were nothing but a shield against a respectability that could never be obtained. To lose Ebhardt was a ghastly thought unto itself, to lose both the young man and Laura would prove ruinous. He did not retire that night but sat brooding in his drawing room and as the dark hours pushed the clock closer to the dawn the General called upon the housemaid. The young girl was hardly awake when she appeared, stray hairs had escaped from their pins and her bonnet was not quite straight. The maid tried to stifle a yawn as she drew a shawl about her bosom.

The General snapped irritably, 'Fetch Mr. Ebhardt, and tell him to come to me, here.'

'Now, sir?' she questioned, observing that the rising sun was still a good hour away.

'Yes, now!' retorted the General, jarring the young woman awake.

It was unlike the General to be so rude. She ran off, and General Spielsdorf waited and paced and waited some more and all the while a chill wind chased the shadows around the park outside, and the rest of the household slept. When Ebhardt came to the main house from his cottage lodgings near the stables, the front door was open and a scattering of crisp leaves had been tumbled into the candlelit entrance. Ebhardt strode into the house. The General stood in the drawing room door and did not speak. Carl walked up to his side. Here they looked at each other and the stillness only amplified the emptiness of it all, of the house and of the heart. Ebhardt was tired for he too had been unable to sleep.

'Tell me, Carl,' the General began, ushering the young man within and closing the door. A silver candle tree flickered by the entrance, its ten candles dripping tallow onto a silver tray. 'Aside from the Bullheimer estate, where did you go yesterday?'

'I did a little investigating,' said Ebhardt, and he held his forehead as if his head ached. 'After I left the Bullheimer estate, sir, I rode over to the old Baroness's house, to look around.'

General Spielsdorf's countenance sparked up as he heard the words. Yes, trust Ebhardt to think on his feet, he could always count on the young man to be resourceful in a time of crisis, had not that been part of his attraction, the spark of will and to be resolute in that will? The General reprimanded himself for being so curt, and reaching over he grasped Carl's forearm. Carl glanced down and gently retracted his arm. It was strange now to feel the General's touch, it seemed unappealingly fragile and a vague part of Ebhardt's mind no longer wanted what allowing it might promise. Even the dream of living the comfortable life the General could have ensured had begun to lose its appeal. The time for such things had rapidly disappeared and it seemed that the beautiful stranger, Marcilla, had precipitated the changes that were now darkening their lives like a thundercloud.

'Tell me then, what did you find?'

'The house is empty, sir, just as you suspected, a ruin. It looks as if no one has lived there since that allegedly dreadful business with the Baroness, and that was supposedly decades ago.'

'Empty!' echoed General Spielsdorf furiously, his anger swelling up inside his gaunt frame. The fact was really no surprise.

'However, there was something else, sir, something most strange. There is a private chapel in the old place that looks as if it had been used recently to perform some peculiar ritual.'

'Ritual?' Confusion piqued the General's expression. 'I don't understand what you are suggesting... what sort of ritual? '

'A profane rite, sir, if you believe in God. Something vile and blasphemous took place in that desecrated house. I am but vaguely religious, as you know, sir, and I cannot say for sure, but there was evidence that something monstrous had occurred before that altar. Upon the chancel I saw a cross, a golden cross with pasted rubies and sapphires. It was a beautifully wrought thing but it had been inverted, turned upside down and there was a golden chalice on the altar too, and it was half filled with what could only have been blood. The blood was encrusted and gone black, spilled all down the side of the goblet. There were flies and maggots and the blood stank. It was this blood that had gone ropey and the smell, it was loathsome. Not far from the altar, discarded over the broken pews in the front I found a sheet, or a shroud, a filthy piece of grave cloth that was also stained with this gore. I found a knife too, a great curved blade with a jewelled hilt. A foreign-looking blade, like the sword the Turks call a Kilij. It too was smeared with sticky blood. The odd thing though, was that the dust in the chapel looked as if it had not been stirred; even though a large and heavy object had been positioned before the altar.'

'What object, Carl?'

'A stone box, sir. A coffin.'

My God!' was all that the General could manage upon hearing the information, and it was a flicker of disgust that curled Ebhardt's lip as he recalled the rank smell of the gore.

'The blood had splashed upon the altar and on the flagstones, gone black and it was revolting. There was a lot of it, as if some beast had been sacrificed. It was a disturbing scene, sir. The coffin was empty; it didn't even contain any bones. For all of this I have absolutely no explanation as to how it had become positioned across the pews, for it must be of considerable weight.'

'What does all of this mean?' returned the General.

'Sir, that house has not been inhabited for years, at least not since its occupation by the old Baroness. I don't think Marcilla's family have taken up residence there at all and it appears that you may be suffering a ruse.'

'A ruse? Why the subterfuge? Are you suggesting that some hideous satanic ritual has been performed and that I have been played a fool, a dupe? But for what reason?'

'Frankly, sir, I do not know. How can we even surmise that the Countess is in any way connected? We have no proof of anything.'

'Then what forces are we facing and what are we to do?'

Ebhardt could not offer a reply. The general shook his head and rubbed at his eyes, grimacing. He was so profoundly tired and these new developments only served to exhaust him more. After a silence, he considered Ebhardt's face. 'What has happened to us…?'

'What happens to everyone when the world changes?' said he. 'You change with the world or you crumble.'

'What are you talking about?' pleaded the General, his thin features etched painfully skeletal in the shadows thrown by the candlelight.

General Spielsdorf reached forward to clasp Ebhardt's arm, but the fellow drew aside and shook his head.

'You know that what we do is wrong,' he said lowly, 'and that because of Laura we couldn't go on as we have been. It is too risky and deceitful.

It doesn't feel right anymore. I'm not so sure that it ever did.'

'Why not?' the General asked.

'Why? Are you demented?'

'Isn't right!' the General retorted with a derisive laugh. 'You think me an old fool. You sleep in my bed, plot behind my back, you scheme to secure your position in my household, even as my lover and my son!'

'What you say is almost disgusting!' Ebhardt declared with a grimmace. 'Be fair, you wanted me and I gave you plenty,' The young man set his lips into a sneer, his body beginning to quake in a rising tide of anger.

'Well, who used who?' the General questioned, raising his eyebrows in a haughty gesture that implied his gentile superiority. The young man lowered his head and his voice.

'Does it matter anymore? I do not think we should see each other like that from now on. To be truthful, it should never have happened.'

'Please, Carl,' the General's voice abruptly cracked and wavered. He looked pathetic and old. 'Don't you feel anything?'

'I never actually felt anything. I did what I had to do, but I was wrong. Wrong on both our accounts. For a while, I thought that I could have do it, but avarice has turned me into no less than a parasite. I think it best that I should leave the estate.'

'No!' begged the General, 'I cannot do without you, even if it means you marry the girl, just as long as you never go away!' Upon those words, the General clasped Carl in an embrace but the other pushed him off, and even as he did this, they heard the scream, a dreadful shriek that tore the house asunder.

'Laura!' Carl called out, and both he and General Spielsdorf burst through the drawing room door. The old man, with surprising agility, did not hesitate in his ascent to the gallery above, Carl following two steps at a time. The dishevelled housemaid appeared in the upstairs hallway, woken for the second time from her sleep, and tripped in her step. The General pushed her aside and the girl was left clutching at her apron, and trembling in fear at the sound of the screams. Ebhardt paused for a moment to reassure the young woman, but she shrank away as the General swept past them both and bolted down the hall. At the far end of the corridor General Spielsdorf halted outside of Laura's room, his hand poised near the door handle, but he appeared hesitant. Ebhardt hurried to him and by the time he reached the older man the screaming from Laura's room had stopped.

'General Spielsdorf?' Carl asked as he looked from the General's stilled hand to his anguished face. 'What is it? What's the matter?'

'It's...cold,' replied the General, and his demeanour bespoke that he had temporarily lost himself, he hardly seemed to recognise Carl at all.

The housekeeper had appeared and was holding a lamp, she looked frightened, and she reached forward to grasp the door handle.

'No!' cried the General and he stayed her hand. 'Don't touch it!'

The woman gave a confused whimper but stood to the side and turned her face to young Ebhardt. Ebhardt stared at the General. When the General raised his hand, the fingertips were red with welts and his eyes seemed to tell that he could not do what Carl must, and that was to breach the door. The handle had turned to ice and the door would not budge open. The welts were frozen burns and Ebhardt understood. The young man gently pushed the General aside. He quickly braced his strong, lithe body and then he thrust his shoulder against the sturdy timber. The panel shook but did not give and the cold was like a glacial flow that stung his flesh through the fabric of his cloak and shirt. Ebhardt braced and thrust again, this time with more force and the door burst inward, opening its maw upon a room that was as black as pitch. The housekeeper raised her lamp. In the wan light, the bedroom became a turbulent maelstrom of murky chiaroscuro flickering, the dimness swimming with grey mist. The temperature was glacial and the little group's breath gelled in the dark airs. The window was closed and the heavy velvet drapes were drawn upon the night world. Laura was supine, collapsed in a swoon across the quilt, shivering, and her bosom was heaving in her nightdress as she gasped to get a breath. Her hair was a copper tangle all knotted and matted and her face was the colour of chalk.

'Oh, please, no! No, go away,' she muttered feebly, gasping rapidly and clawing at her sheets. 'No, no, no!' There was such agony in that one word repeated over and over as to rend open the soul. The dream had infused her mind, the nightmare had taken over reality, and with one final and exhausting effort Laura pulled herself up into a half-sitting position, beheld Carl and her uncle and screamed the word again. It was as if she recognised her fate in that moment, a fate that would have her powerless and forever chained to the will of these men. It was as if she knew of their illicit love and how this had doomed her. She wanted only Marcilla to be with her, and she used the last of her strength to rail at the General before collapsing limply like a rag doll into her tide of cold, undulating sheets. Her uncle and Carl both moved quickly to the bedside. The housekeeper, bringing the lamp closer, was beginning to sob as much as she tried to contain her terror. They all looked upon the young woman in the bed and Carl saw for the first-time what change had been wrought in this girl over the short space of a just over a week. This was not Laura, no; here was a wasted and emaciated creature that was whiter than the sheets upon which she lay. Only days ago, she had been dancing at her birthday party, she had been laughing. She had been telling him how much she loved him. Now she lay like a broken doll that seemed to have no blood, no life, and she shivered like a leaf coming loose from the branch. It cut strangely at his heart and he could not contain the gasp of shock that accompanied the realisation of his guilt. Laura had collapsed upon the final shriek, collapsed in exhaustion and to find her in such a state was distressing enough, but what was even more horrible was the one word that leaked from her lips and that word was a name and the name was 'Marcilla'.

Into the forest the dappled mare plunged, her rider gritting his teeth, the fading moon was a translucent silver disk and her pale light glimmered through the trees. Ebhardt tapped his riding crop against the mare's flank, goading her to fly like the wind, for every second counted, every breath was of the utmost urgency. He knew the forest byways like the back of his hand and he now took the shortest way that he knew through the woods, ducking under low reaching branches, skimming over felled trunks. The mare's hoofs pounded the earth, spraying dirt left and right, her nostrils flaring and she champed at her bit, but Ebhardt rode and rode and a host of shadows chased him through the woods, pursued him with dark and strangling fingers. Within the passing of a quarter hour he rode into the village square, there to jump down from his mount and cross quickly to a door beneath a rickety eave. A dog barked in an alley and the water splashed from the fountain. These were the only sounds in this hour of the early morning, for the tavern had yet to open its doors and no one stirred in their homes. In the fading starlight, on the distant hilltop, the vague outline of a castle ruin dominated the skyline, its turrets engulfed in a whorl of translucent cloud. Ebhardt reached out and took hold of the knocker, a lion's head cast in iron with a ring through its nose, and thudded loudly upon the door. There was no immediate response. As he waited impatiently for a reply Carl gave a cursory glance upward toward that granite palace on the hill, but the clouds drew a veil over its edifice and the glimmering stars vanished and the view was lost. He repeated the action of knocking upon the door. Keenly his mare pulled back on her bridle.

'Doctor?' Carl beckoned up to the window where the dying moon shone its final, feeble rays upon the glass. A little wind troubled the dark velvet green leaves of pink and yellow auricular in the flower box under the eave. Up there, on the floor above, a sound stirred and jaundiced lamplight flickered in the dark space of the casement. A shape wavered behind the lace. Erich, dressed in his night attire and cap opened the window and looked down at Ebhardt.

'Doctor,' called Ebhardt, 'you must come at once.'

The General took Laura by the hand and knelt beside her on the bed. Both their faces were lit by the steady flame of the lamp that had now been placed on the bedside table. Laura was so cold, so cold that the General thought he had never felt living human flesh of that temperature before. It terrified him. Worse, he reprimanded himself on another shockingly subliminal level, one that taunted him with the notion that he really did not know what warm female flesh felt like at all. As the thought spiked his brain it made him wince with guilt and turn sharply, as if someone else were in the room, someone else fingering his mind. He was horrified and of course there was no one there but the housekeeper. Yet it was so true, he did not know how female flesh felt because he had never been married and the army only placed you in the company of men, young men with crisp fine bodies and newly flexed muscles. There was only the knowledge of young men's skin and male scent, of their lips on your hard, pulsing flesh, of their heat and their violence as they took you to Hell. It began a sick feeling in the General's guts that his head should be filled with such filthy self-deprecating thoughts at this moment of crisis. He had done all he could possibly have done, he had nurtured this girl, he had loved this girl, he had given up the army for this girl, he had even consented that Carl should marry her, done all to hold the balance and keep his love close by. He had called the Doctor when her symptoms had first appeared, but that had availed ridicule. Was it that the General had become a parody of himself, was the scaffolding of his life collapsing about his head? The General had begun to feel desperate, and the fabric of existence was slipping through his grasp. Ebhardt was riding like the wind to fetch the Doctor right now, and he prayed that the physician would not be too late. If Laura could be saved then there might be hope yet, all might not be destroyed.

Laura seemed to squirm under his touch, to resist with the little energy she had left in her mortal coil, but he did not let go of her hand. It was like she did not want his touch, like she knew and understood the true monster within and how it had used and disregarded her heart. On her pillow she writhed and shuddered, gasping, her lips the colour of the pillow, the pillow the colour of the sheets, the sheets the colour of an all engulfing and concealing mist through which they all must pass only to emerge with one of them lost. Only the housekeeper stood by the General now and her face was a knot of helpless agony upon whose cheek flowed unstoppable tears. The General barely retained his own composure. At his back the housekeeper hovered, speechless, unable to move for her fright. Laura's room was so cold and the General looked to the window, but it was closed. His fingers hurt from the frost burns he had sustained when he had tried the door handle, but despite this he took the girl's shivering hand in his own and raised it to his own quivering lips. As Laura's eyes flickered she recognised him, and she knew that his gesture was as desperate as it was but token, the sight of him made her recoil in a jarring movement, her eyes proclaiming that she knew that she had been most grievously betrayed.

'Marcilla,' she gasped defiantly, rejecting her uncle, her voice cracking like a windowpane, becoming more desperate, rising to a shriek as she tried to rise above her pillow. 'Marcilla!'

'Calm yourself, Laura,' the General told her, gently pushing her back down, his eyes flashing bright with a ghastly anger that shocked the housekeeper into movement. Fetch her!' he spat at the woman, his command vehement with a scarcely suppressed rage, and the housekeeper dashed toward the door, whimpering as she went, the lamp she carried splashing pale orange light in her wake. She ran down the corridor, its red carpet like a monster tongue in the lamplight and she came up to Marcilla's door where she paused hesitantly before she timidly knocked.

'Marcilla?' she whispered, but there was no reply. 'Marcilla?'

The woman opened the door. Inside the bedroom was silent and empty and only the draperies stirred in a gentle wind. One of the windows was opened. The housekeeper ran to the portal to close it, and looked out into the failing dark. The night was upon the brink of surrender, the first glow of the coming dawn was a rosy tinge beyond the brake and the mountains. Down there, hiding in the trees, she imagined she saw something flickering in the dying night, a shaded thing, a devil on horseback, with eyes like cinders and all wrapped up in an adumbrate spread of blackest pitch. The shape sat astride a shining black steed with hoofs that cast argent sparks as they struck against the ground. The mount belched smoke from its nostrils and its eyes glowed with black flame. Either rider or horse, in the shifting black she could not be sure which, had wings. She gasped when she glimpsed that Apollyon plumage and the dark angel threw back a look from those blazing eyes. She clenched her fingers into a fist and the fist went to her mouth to plug the scream that was rising in her throat. In terror, the woman fled back to Laura's room.

'Marcilla,' called Laura, her voice trailing off to a choked whisper.

The General did not know what to do, what to say, or how to be of any comfort. 'She'll be here very soon,' he lied as he stroked her cheek, but Laura turned her face away. A gasp made him twist his head and as he turned the housekeeper appeared with a face as white as winter's pall, with quivering lips of chalk she was unable to speak. She was pointing down the hall in the direction of Marcilla's room.

'Well?' the General demanded coldly, getting up and striding up to the trembling woman. 'Where the devil is she?'

The woman quaked in terror for she thought for one horrible moment that the angry man might strike her in his fury. That word, 'devil', that was exactly what she had seen outside in the park.

'I don't know, sir,' she stuttered, 'her room is empty. I...'

'I am here.'

Marcilla's voice cut the housekeeper's sentence short. Startled, General Spielsdorf flicked his vision toward the open bedroom door. Marcilla stood in the door frame, her lovely body dressed in black lace from toe to crown. They faced each other and their eyes bespoke a terrible impasse and a dreadful tension, but that tension must soon snap, and savagely.

'I went to the chapel,' said Marcilla, her eyes growing bigger as she spoke, 'to pray.' Sincerity and sadness lilted in her tone, and perhaps there was a hint of remorse too, for as she moved toward the bed it appeared that a tear rolled down her white cheek. Laura heaved and gasped as she held out her arms, inviting the last embrace of a lover. Marcilla moved forward, fragile in one aspect of her being and yet still lithe and predatory in another. The girl prowled as would the black leopard, captured and caged, steeped of a passion so dangerous that it should be kept behind bars. In contempt, she stepped past the terrified housekeeper and barely even looked upon the General. The girl in the bed gave one last shudder and was still and upon that convulsion the General groaned aloud.

'You may open the curtains', said Marcilla in a cold and emotionless monotone, her expression now blank, the solitary tear evaporated. 'It is daylight now,' and as she turned and looked upon the cowed and trembling vision of the General. Triumphantly she pulled herself up, straight like a soldier, a soldier that he could never command, for she belonged to the ranks of woman. 'She is dead.'

Upon this ghastly declaration, the General whimpered in his defeat. How unmanly, thought Marcilla, that the General should grovel so at the graveside of one whose faith he had so easily betrayed. Alongside the bed Marcilla drew, rippling as a black wave ripples upon the ocean of night, and her eyes did not leave the General's. At that moment, the night surrendered its hold upon the earth and Apollo's first golden spears filled the semi-circular entablature of the window. It lit the inner pilasters with two columns of fire and the glass shone in a blinding aureate flash.

The housekeeper pulled the curtains wide with a shaking clasp and the morning light spilled a river of gold upon Marcilla's skin. The beautiful stranger flinched like one stung by a wasp, and her shadow responded, leaping as if burnt by a flame and writhing upon the wall, tripping and flickering madly, all wild movement and animalistic, imaginary, a hippogryph with wide and spreading wings. The silhouette of her voluptuous frame caught alight and she resembled a candle, her skin the tallow, her lips the wick and her auburn hair the flame. The coldness in the room leaked suddenly away and Laura's eyes rolled back in her head. She smiled in adoration as she dropped her arms, knowing that Marcilla, her true love, had come to her in her last moment.

Marcilla did not even look at her. Discarded but filled with divine glory the young girl fell upon her pillow with a pacified groan, her hair a ragged yellow pennant upon the satin, a thin ribbon of scarlet seeping from under her left bosom. The red stained the bed linen but no one saw. It was the last drop of Laura's blood, and in that drop of red was the seal of Marcilla's triumph and the proof of the General's loss. For he had invited her in, invited the monster to warm itself in the glow of his hearth. She had known his inner heart all along, he knew this and she had fed upon his deceptions and his follies to exploit and to glut at the spring of his male foolishness. The vaporous airs in the room swirled as they dissipated and the General's breath froze in his throat. Marcilla's twisted shadow spilled over the bed, over Laura's corpse and settled like a huge palpitating fly upon the General's lips. The housekeeper seeing the monstrous shadow cried out in terror and fainted and as the woman collapsed to the floor the General looked to his niece.

'No,' he managed to gasp, realising the horrible finality and the results of his selfishness, and how the end had come so swiftly, a doom upon his cardboard household. As he opened his mouth the shadow leaked in between his lips. Therein he gulped down the bitter taste of evil. Even as he spoke that word of denial the Doctor and Ebhardt were leaping from their saddles. They had ridden until their horses were wet with sweat and had entered the park just as the sun was rising over the mountains and flooding the valley and the forest with yellow light. The two men passed under the portico and took to the stairs, two at a time, Vordenburg breathing heavily as they burst into Laura's bedroom. He tore off his hat and tossed it irreverently upon the end of the bed at the girl's feet. Before them the General had fallen upon the quilt and was cradling the limp doll that was his niece and he was calling her name, calling that he might wake her up, yet she did not respond.

'Laura,' the General sobbed, and all for hope, and hope but a slender thread that had been severed by this catastrophe. 'Laura… Laura!' he begged. The girl did not stir. Carl and the Doctor could see quite plainly and painfully that Ebhardt's dash for help had availed nothing and that Laura was dead. Even virile young Ebhardt was impotent in this catastrophe, and his guts took a hit, as if he had been punched. There stood the General, a man who had commanded many men and proved his bravery in battle, now hunched over a flaccid girl and reduced to a sobbing wreck. What had happened to the world so suddenly? Were they being punished by the divine will? This tragedy might topple the entire house and destroy everything.

'Doctor Erich, please hurry,' the General urged, even though he knew that it was far too late and that Laura was beyond the realm of medicine, that she was dead and gone, just like her parents were dead, and gone. Just like hope was dead and gone. The Doctor had not seemed to take the General's fears seriously a few days ago and this was the price that they all must pay. Yet it was so easy to assign blame in the face of trauma when you absolved yourself from wrong doing, wasn't it? Even as he realised this truth, the General could no longer summon the will to anger, all he felt was the stone of guilt and of regret rolling heavily upon his heart. He cast his eyes downwards and he could not even look directly at Ebhardt. The Doctor placed his black case upon the quilt near Laura's feet and his discarded hat tumbled to the floor. Ignoring this he leaned forward and looked intently for a moment at the supine girl. Observing no motion in her limbs or breast he reached his hand to clasp her wrist. He felt with the tips of his fingers but no pulse was evident in the white flesh. Undoing the silk ribbon at Laura's breast, he pulled back her nightgown, and from his wallet he took a monaural stethoscope. Here he paused, just briefly, to glimpse a scarlet stain on Laura's bosom, a rosy floret that had soaked into the creamy linen. Its blotch was puzzling and it stopped him briefly as he raised his listening instrument, and holding Laura's bodice down he exposed her naked breast. With one deft movement Vordenburg placed the open end of the hearing trumpet upon her bare skin, under her breast, and put his ear to the narrow end. The soft nipple brushed against his cheek. He held his breath and listened. There was no heartbeat to hear, no respiration in the lungs. As he raised his head and lifted the stethoscope it came away smeared with blood, and the blood dripped from its rim in crimson droplets, splashing upon the sheets.

The Doctor beheld the purple bruise upon the dead girl's breast and the scars just above the pale nipple, scars that were deep, as if two needles had been driven into Laura's flesh, and they were ragged about the edges and encrusted with scabby blood. The last of Laura's blood had oozed out from those wounds, seeped afresh in the act of the Doctor loosening her clothes and listening for her departed heartbeat. He could scarcely believe what he saw, or even the possibility of what it implied. Science must refute the possibility, because by those wounds science was made into nonsense. He gritted his teeth and realised the awful mistake he had made in half dismissing the girl's condition as hysteria, for now she was dead and his head was full of confusion. Yet it did not seem possible, the marks upon her breast, surely not? It implied an agency beyond reason, beyond modern medicine; it suggested an older and primal evil, and worse it suggested the existence of something that was beyond human understanding. This was one of those bewilderingly intersecting moments where reason and superstition locked swords. Nonetheless, just like the inexplicable death of Bruno Heitz, part of Erich's mind still contested the possibility of a revenant. It was hardly probable that Laura had been killed by a thing from beyond the grave, for to believe that meant medical science was as vain as it was ultimately useless. The Doctor looked to the General and then to Carl and indicated with a glance that they should see. The two men stared down in disbelief at the dead girl's naked bosom, but what was even more disturbing and ghastly was the fact that Laura had died with a satisfied smile upon her lips.

'No!' uttered the General, knowing now the horrible truth. This then was to be his punishment for denying the female flesh, that he should meet death face to face and not even realise the fact. How deceptive had been that coil of Marcilla's cold beauty, for it had come into his house upon his own invitation and fed upon his family blood and upon his deceits. A gust of wind swirled about the room even though the window was closed, and the General snapped his head up to where Marcilla stood on the opposite side of the bed. Her appellation was upon his lips and he was ready to leap over Laura's body and grasp Marcilla and throttle her, but the beautiful stranger was no longer by the bed and her name passed into the ether. In fact, she was no longer in the room. It seemed impossible that she could have slipped out of their sight without being seen by anyone, but she was gone. The General called her name again and he looked to the door. All three men turned, but they saw and heard nothing other than the wind as it gathered up the lace and blew out into the hall. The wind blasted down the corridor and poured over the banister, it extinguished the candles burning in the drawing room and blew past Perseus and Andromeda, and it slammed the door closed with an emphatic crash, and the echo of General Spielsdorf's cry chased the wind out of the house. The wind rolled along the glacis, skewering a brittle leaf upon the lance of the sundial, and it tore at the ivy and at the ochre leaves upon the trees and caressed and bent their sturdy trunks and boughs.

A chill shivered through the interlaced and vaulted heights, its whisper a withering malediction breathed into the air, and the tempest swept through the park and over the green, through the forest and past the village and onward up the mountain. Through the woodland it called, winnowing free loose bark and dry sprigs, cold and a herald of death, singing its victory as it rose into the ether. The strange music it orchestrated sounded in a nightmare vortex, syncopated with the howl of a lone wolf and the rustle of leather wings. It whirled about pylons and rippled through the sculptured plumage of stone angels, upon crypt and grave stone, it reeled along turret and spire, along crumbling stone and splintered timber and it paused ever so briefly upon the lip of darkness that was the great oaken portal of a ruined castle. Stillness held the world in thrall then, stillness that froze all life rigid and life shivered in muted silence.

'Marcilla!' the General shouted, but there was no reply. Marcilla had fled into the dawn and would never return. General Spielsdorf was now among the condemned and he would repent the betrayal of his life's blood forever. A great shadow rode through the park with black wings wide, a darkness that flapped madly before the dawn, riding ahead of the sun's golden arrows.

As it fled the rising sun, it too called out 'Marcilla' and its ghostly chorus sang an aria to the tomb. In that space between the dark and the light where the appellation was sounded, it was altered, rearranged and changed, and as it changed so did the voice's pitch change. The timbre of a male voice became the beckon and summons of a female intonation, but the female voice did not call 'Marcilla', but instead it corrupted the name so that it was similar but different.

'Mircalla', the woman's voice sang like a chorus calling, in a cadence falling, in appoggiatura as the wind shivered a sigh across the new morning. The wind lilted over a raised tumulus decorated with sculpted ivy and the earth gave a little shudder as it turned to face the sun. The tomb was soon alight with a golden luminance that burned away the veils of churning mist, and through that dissipating mist the shimmering eidolon of a female form in white slipped by the tomb and disappeared into a great oak door that was closed fast upon the world. The ghost faded into the castle ruin and into the nothing as if it had never owned solid shape. It had forsaken the world of the living, a world that now did not include Laura Spielsdorf, and that world awoke from troubled dreams and screamed and donned a black mourning veil. In the ruined graveyard, beneath the broken turrets and battlements, the wind stirred dead leaves and caressed the name that was wrought upon the crypt in the castle graveyard. The inscription was vivid in the breaking dawn. It read:

Mircalla Karnstein

1522-1546.

Chapter 5

Bereaved

In which Emma Morton grieves the death of her friend and a village girl is pursued in the forest.

The Morton house stood in a picturesque location beyond the forest. Its aspect looked towards the steadfast mountains, its parkland green and lush. The residence was a large house, with a carriageway that ended in an ivy-covered portico at the front doors. A great oak tree stood sentinel near the house and around it a path led to an ornamental lake. The gardens were cleanly hedged with topiary and roses and neatly trimmed lawns. There were many rooms in the Morton house, but its size did not warrant a ballroom as did the house of General Spielsdorf, yet the decors were comfortable and fashionable if not overly splendid. One could sit in agreeable surroundings, in the library and digest literature from the vast collection of books therein, or one could take breakfast in the sun-room and walk in the gardens and admire the flowers and trees. The main floor was connected to the upper floor by a staircase with a gleaming rosewood banister, and upon the walls, rather than stilted portraits, hung etchings of far away and exotic places. The kitchen had its own herb garden and there were a few fruit trees that alas could not be counted as an orchard, and a small herd of Holstein Friesians provided fresh milk and cream. Not far from the house a path led through the gardens to a crystalline lake where ducks paddled through the rushes and salmonidae darted in the cool depths. In the bright gleaming sunshine, the residence appeared a warming and welcoming place to live, even with the promise of a creeping change in the weather.

Every other day, when the sun shone warmly, Emma and her Governess, Mademoiselle Perrodon, went walking in the gardens and enjoyed nature, sometimes in the morning and sometimes in the evening. They were returning from just such a walk as the day was closing and were approaching the house from the path by the great oak. Emma saw the dappled mare tied up by the front entrance and joyous that they should have a visitor, broke into a run. Yet her joy was short lived, for Carl Ebhardt, the young manager of General Spielsdorf's estates had come some twenty kilometres to deliver heart-breaking news. He looked quite exhausted upon his arrival, his black hair dishevelled by the wind and his handsome face drawn into stiff lines. There was no cause to smile in any case for he was the harbinger of ill tidings, of a ghastly intelligence that proclaimed Laura Spielsdorf's sudden death. Upon entering the drawing room with her Governess and overhearing the news being related to her father, Emma had collapsed upon a sofa, wringing her hands and was unable to stay neither the wracking sobs nor the tears that filled her great brown eyes. At first the girl was incredulous and thought Carl Ebhardt was jesting, but the young man had remained stoically serious and Morton himself had drawn Carl aside. Morton was afraid that this terrible herald would bring on another bout of nervous melancholia in his daughter and that Emma's fragile life would find a new and unwanted suffering. Life had been a difficult course to steer for everyone in the last few years, coping with his wife's suicide and the necessary juggling of financial matters both locally and abroad. Morton's regular absence from home also brought with it the fear that this new turn of events would take poor Emma closer to complete introversion and depression.

The relationship with Laura Spielsdorf had been a most positive boon in Emma's life but now that was all wiped away by the terrible fact of her untimely death. Sometimes, Morton confessed to himself, he hardly understood the female in neither mind nor body at all. Of course, he professed deep affection for his late wife, but he had no doubt been oblivious of her decaying mental state, and that she had taken her own life was still something Morton found difficult to reconcile. He could not afford to be oblivious now to Emma's needs, and here was this new and unexpected tragedy. They had only just attended Laura's birthday party and she had been the picture of perfect health and beauty. Emma looked to him now and he seemed hardly up to the task of consolation, deeply vexed as he was, and hovering precariously on the brink of a serious confusion. Morton felt clumsy and inept. In some ways, it was fortunate to have Mademoiselle Perrodon at hand, she seemed the only port of balm available to poor Emma at this moment, and the Governess sat beside the bereaved girl and embraced her. Emma berated the severe workings of Fate, and she sobbed with a grief that a thousand words of consolation would never take away. If this grief belied her as weak in mind and delicate in constitution then where was she to find the strength to cope? Oh, this was terrible news! Emma cried as Mademoiselle Perrodon wrapped her arm about Emma's shoulders. Her father and Ebhardt were doing it now, condescending, whispering and only half-looking at her, separating her from what they saw as 'further suffering', but by that exclusion they only seemed to be making her feel worse. Was there something so terrible about her friend's death that she should not know the details? What was she being spared?

'How ridiculous do they think I am?' thought Emma, finding a glimmer of resentment under the sobs of her grief. Yes, she was upset, but although she was bereaved she did not for a moment think that she was going to expire from shock! Could she not exhibit her grief without being thought a weakling, after all, was not her reaction justified in that the news was so shocking and so sudden? Of course, these men did not say as much aloud but it was obvious what they were thinking. Emma tried to compose herself, and between her sobs she also tried to listen. What was it that Ebhardt had intimated, that his words suggested something dark, a malignant agency under whose thrall pretty Laura had fallen? His words were fragmentary and made little sense, and they only added to her father's confusion. Morton could only shake his head gravely throughout the interview. When Emma glanced up and daubed her tears with the handkerchief that Mademoiselle Perrodon had proffered, Emma's head felt light and her stomach and chest hurt from crying so, and it was difficult to hear what the two men were saying. Still, she wanted to know, because Laura, after all, had been her friend. It was not fair that Laura should die so young; why, she had only just begun her life. She was going to be engaged to Ebhardt, but he now wore an expression of stone and there was nothing of happy emotion rendered there. Perhaps he had decided to close, like a book, to shut the covers as if that story had been read and he did not need the climax of further surprises. He needed perhaps to think about other things and was hoping that the ordeal of delivering this news would be brief and he could be gone. He had mentioned a funeral. A funeral!

Worse even was the half-whispered intimation that Laura had already been buried. They had cremated her remains over a week ago and no one had come to tell! Cremation was blasphemous and the reserve of heretics and infidels! Poor Laura! Emma's realisation, that she had been infantilised once again, that she had been delicately spared even that important detail and denied her grief, lit another fire of resentment in her core. For the life of her she could not understand this silly protective shield these men were putting up, as if they were being chivalrous in withholding knowledge. To be fair to her father this news was now only just being told to him, but he was acting like she was some hybrid and delicate flower, that to hear the truth would be too much for her to take, that she would shrivel up and wither. In any case he too didn't seem to fully comprehend its effect and Emma wanted to tell him that he should not treat her so and to remind him of her mother's fate. Sadly, he only looked confused and he could not have been any more remote at this moment if he were on the other side of the moon. Emma resentfully surmised that if her father had understood his own wife's illness a little better it might have been easier for her to cope with this awful news now. Was there any point then in protecting her? She didn't think so, the scars still bled because she still had no notion as to why.

'If there is a yearning in my heart,' Emma thought to herself, 'then it is that I wish my father would cease to treat me like a child. I am nineteen years old! Am I never to have any control over my character, over my own mind? Can I not ever be allowed think for myself?' It appeared that she was to have no opinion on the subject being discussed. Yet, after all, Laura had been her friend and companion, was that unimportant? Laura had been coming to visit and there would have been some sunny days to be shared, but now there was only misery and sorrow with which to cope. These men were being so secretive and Emma shook her head, and Mademoiselle misinterpreted her physicality as anguish and held her closer. For Emma, the room was becoming stifling and she suddenly felt the desire to push Mademoiselle off, to get up and leave the room, but she struggled against the impulse. There was a strange and almost unwelcome closeness in the way Mademoiselle held her and kissed her cheek. She glanced over the Governess's shoulder and looked beyond the window. The sun was dying rapidly outside and the sky was turning deep navy blue. It didn't seem right that the lines of sorrow should be drawn up so sharply and so blackly and the world go on ever so arrogantly. Yet the world did go on despite the shadow of grief that had been cast over its girth. Such was the dismal philosophy thus being described to her, that one shall cope and continue and still be excluded, even in the face of tragedy. As to how long she could go on in this world of isolation was really the question, and she felt certain that the problem must soon be addressed if she were not to go mad herself. Emma could only see herself falling deeper and deeper with every succeeding day into a thoroughly subdued existence that was both passive and passionless. The thought only served to dim her spirits and she burst into another bout of despondent tears. Mademoiselle held her tighter.

'Poor Laura,' said Mr. Morton, dropping his eyes and nodding his head back and forth as he spoke, '...and the General?'

'The General has gone away, sir,' Ebhardt replied, his voice dull and soulless. He was looking at Emma as he spoke, 'to visit a friend, the Baron Hartog.'

'Yes, he wouldn't want to stay in that house. I understand that.'

The ghostly shadow of a vaguely wry smile rippled over Ebhardt's handsome face. Indeed, the General's house was empty now of both life and purpose. Though had it ever really been alive? It had been the breeding ground for lies anyway, but Laura's death had been the most horrible way to sort the mess out, or complicate it further depending on which way you viewed the situation. He knew there would be a lot of adjustments to make if he stayed and the thought of a cold future made him tired. Over a week ago he had dispatched a letter to Baron Hartog, but the General had not received a reply. To avoid further sorrow, General Spielsdorf had decided to leave his mansion and travel to Moravia. His house had become a mausoleum, just like the abandoned castle of the Baroness Meinster, and only phantom shadows now dwelt therein. Emma Morton was young and this woe would pass, even if it meant her heart was temporarily cracked. At least it was not irrevocably shattered. Through her tears Emma thought that Carl was staring at her and she managed a brief smile. Even though their eyes met fleetingly, Ebhardt hardly even saw the girl, for he seemed to look straight through her. Emma blushed pink, and it was not simply because of her tears, and she felt a strange frisson ripple in her flesh. Even in the moment of terrible grief, the young man's beauty made her pulse leap, and though modesty had taught her that she should look away, she did not. Morton followed Ebhardt's gaze. The young man did not appear to acknowledge Emma, and she felt inexplicably rejected. Of course, he had been Laura's beau, but he was so handsome, and should she feel bad about thinking him so? Ebhardt did not utter a goodbye but turned to leave and perceiving that she had been blatantly ignored Emma collapsed into more tears.

'Mademoiselle Perrodon will look after her,' Morton said, though he still did not move to console his daughter but instead followed Ebhardt, closing the drawing room door upon the two women and momentarily locking away the grief. Outside he watched silently as Carl stepped up into the saddle of his horse and rode off till the trees and distance and the oncoming night obscured him from vision.

Morton wondered what was expected of him now, what did he say and what did he do? If it had been an issue about trade or commerce he would have birthed the answer immediately, but matters of the female condition left him bewildered. A raven called from the eaves and Morton glanced up to see it take wing against the darkling sky. The afternoon sun had descended quickly and filled his eyes with blind shadows. The twilight seemed stilled and hushed; tentative and awaiting a fresh calamity because the presence of the raven so oft proclaimed misfortune, Morton did not understand why such blows should strike their lives. Hadn't he come here, to this distant place called Stiria in the hope of removing himself from further tragedy? Such ill tidings and how he needed to think for a bit. Mr. Morton stood for a little while on his portico wrestling with his problem but he hesitated to return inside to his daughter. Part of his heart knew that he should go to her but another part did not want to because that part would have to revisit and deal with past unhappiness. Morton shrugged and closed that corner of his mind off despite the foreboding little shiver that wound its serpentine way about his heart.

A romantic afternoon with Birgit was a fine way to spend your day off. A little assured spring animated Conrad's step as he walked back to the house. Pausing by the lower orchard gate, a rolled-up blanket under his arm, he glanced up at the sky. Gloaming was upon the world already and it mantled the distant mountain peaks in purple shadows. The last of the sunshine was beaming weakly through the gap of the far-off divide. Although the weather was subtly changing into cooler climes, it had been a warm afternoon in more ways than one, with Birgit pressed against him and her hot breath in his ear, whispering lurid talk and kissing his lips. How they had forgotten all about time while in each other's embrace, and the afternoon had abruptly caught them with its long and spidery shadow fingers. Conrad had hastily pulled on his trousers and his shirt, telling Birgit that he would walk her through the forest to the town precinct, but she refused, laughing at his silly gallantry. The young man still felt guilty. Birgit had insisted that she go alone, and that she wasn't afraid of the dark. Besides, by the time that she got home to the Bullheimer farm she would have thought of the perfect excuse for her tardiness, and old man Bullheimer was easy enough not to bother much. There was of course Conrad's position to consider at the Spielsdorf house. He was one of the General's personal attendants and held good status, and although the General had now gone away, the young valet knew that he should not be caught acting with solecism. However, with the station came the benefits that allowed for little dalliances like this afternoon's rendezvous in the apple orchard. Birgit was happy enough with their arrangements, in fact she quite liked Conrad. He remembered how her eye had caught his that first day she had come to the kitchens for cider and preserve in return for the Bullheimer cheese. Her brown eyes had glinted with the sparks thrown by his silver buckles and he had looked so handsome all dressed up and important in his livery. She was a flirt that one, smiling invitingly and running a quick look over every contour of his body. She had let a stray hand flutter against his buttock as she had moved past him and down to the cellar with cook, throwing a sultry glance over her shoulder when cook was not looking. Conrad had thought of nothing else for the whole of that day, except in his mind the stroke became extended and Birgit looked like the type of girl who was not shy. He chuckled to himself as he relived the moment.

It was with pleasure that Conrad recalled their rendezvous today, down at the far end of the apple orchard away from the stables and the main house and away from any who might glimpse their love. The young man had brought a patterned rug with him and unrolled it beneath a tree. Whilst he did this Birgit giggled and reached up a hand to pluck an apple from a close twig. Her hips swayed invitingly as she stretched up onto her toes and with her other hand she undid the ribbon that tied up her flaming russet locks. Birgit took a few apples and put them in her basket along with the cider, and then she rubbed the last red apple upon her pretty floral skirt till it glowed in the sunlight. When she raised it to her mouth and bit into its sweet flesh, Conrad felt his heart begin to pound and his length go hard in his trousers. Birgit watched him, watched him lick his lips. She extended the apple and proffered the fruit and he took it and bit into it roughly. The girl laughed as he threw away the core and embraced her, taking her basket and pushing it aside, peeling away the embroidered linen of her blouse and freeing her bosoms. Conrad kissed her hard and she returned his kiss, fervidly, ardently, and he buried his face in the valley of those breasts and tasted the sweet nipples till they stood hard and red. Onto the blanket they fell, Conrad shaking loose from his shirt, Birgit tugging urgently at his trousers. His sex liberated Birgit's lush mouth closed upon its swollen length, her tongue wet and hot but she didn't rush but rather paused agonisingly at the tip of the shaft. Conrad thought he might die of pleasure right there and then, yet he did not, the moment was to be savoured not squandered. Overcoming the temptation, he shifted his position as she worked her mouth upon him, and his own mouth sought between the milky dip of her thighs. She gasped as his tongue found her most sensitive part and there he sipped with a slow and wondrous ardour until at length they coupled and both spent and shuddered in each other's arms and the afternoon faded from gold to primrose. Conrad wrapped Birgit in the closeness of his naked skin and pulling the blanket tightly about their bodies he kissed her and she smiled. They listened quietly to the birds twittering in the trees and to the low hollow clang of bells from the high pasture where the cows and the sheep grazed. The sounds were harmonious and made both Conrad and Birgit drowsy. He traced a languid finger over the lines of her skin and breathed in her scent, her sweet odours, and theirs was a moment of shared bliss as they touched each other, subdued after the flames of passion. She kissed his lips and put her cheek against his chest. In her ear, she heard the thrumming of his heart. A little breeze rifled through the orchard, crisp with its promise of winter and an apple shook loose from a branch, falling close to Birgit's wicker basket. Sadly, it was a reminder that Birgit should go before it got too late.

Now the jaunt left Conrad's step as he looked at the approach of night and thought perhaps that he should have insisted that he accompany Birgit home. The weather was beginning to change and the dark was coming on quicker. The first stars were glimmering low in the panoply of the sky, pale and translucent, and the moon was radiating into view as the sun died. Conrad's body gave a little shudder and he did not know why, a portend that reminded him of the recent tragedy in his master's house. A chill passed over his skin as he did up the buttons of his shirt. He did not like to think of Laura's death, not just now, not after he had experienced such a happy afternoon, but the thought was there and he could not shift it from his mind. No one had really come to grips with the Laura's passing and there was certainly a mystery surrounding the circumstances.

The beautiful house guest Marcilla had disappeared, Carl Ebhardt had ridden to the Morton estate this morning, and the General had gone to Moravia. Conrad wondered what the General would do when he returned and whether he would continue in this house or move to Vienna. Moving away would mean leaving Birgit. Indeed, there was much to speculate and much to be anxious about. Why though did earthly pleasure almost invariably lead you along a dark and contradictory road? The shadows had disturbed his felicity. He should be joyous for the gift of his amorous afternoon. Conrad told himself this much, nodding as he did so, and he should not be pondering doom! Despite this, and considering Laura's death, he felt concern and guilt for having let Birgit go home alone. As the chill in the air poured down from the alpine heights it swayed the branches in the fruit orchard and Conrad shivered and he rolled up the rug and slung it over his shoulders. Well, it was getting late and he must get back even though it now seemed hardly chivalrous to have let Birgit go off by herself. He'd be in the kitchen soon and cook would have dinner going and pretty Birgit would be fine, she knew the forest ways well and was not likely to get lost in the dark, besides, the moon was rising over the tree tops and its light would guide her home. She'd be safe, of that he was certain.

A bird screeched in the dark, startling Birgit as she walked along the forest path. She had been feeling fine until that bird had shrieked and the sound was so sudden that her bones almost leapt from her skin. Defensively she hugged her basket tight and glanced nervously about. Not that she could see all that clearly, for although the moon had now risen, her vision was limited in the occluded forest and it was difficult to make out shape and form in the shadows. Birgit told herself that she was silly for feeling edgy because she had walked these forests many times, and had walked them in the evening too, and nothing bad had happened before. So why did she sense doubt and worry now? Perhaps she should have let Conrad walk her home after all, it would have been the journey of half an hour and no one would have questioned. Silly how the heart made you do impulsive things, Birgit thought, and now she was alone in the dark and strangely frightened. Perhaps she might be home sooner if she took a shortcut, and she convinced herself that maybe that was her best option. Her chosen way took her by the village graveyard, and as she came at length out of the woods and into a clearing the moon beamed upon the burial ground. She hastily skipped through the rusty gate and walked with quick step among the tilted crosses and mouldering tumuli. Here Birgit found her heartbeat getting faster and she began to regret her hasty change of path.

The wind rustled in the trees and there were weird and unpredictable sounds in the dark, like animal calls and birds flapping, but the sounds were distorted and scary. Birgit bit down on her lower lip. It was too late to turn back now, too late to ask Conrad to hold her hand in the shadows, and then another sound filtered to her ear out of the dark, a sound that was so close that it might have called right out beside her, a half whispered and half sung suspiring groan. The girl froze in her tracks, caught in the cruciform shadow of a headstone. A little distance to the left Birgit thought she saw movement. Yes, it wasn't her imagination; there was a movement in the dark, over there, behind that stele. The shift of darkness within the night space made her stifle a cry and choke off a whimper. Staring wildly, she could not make out anything clearly, but it seemed that a thick mist was seeping up through the ground, and rapidly, and forming into a black and silver-grey column like a thunder cloud. There were sparks in the column of mist too, as if tiny stars were exploding in the maelstrom of vapour and churning with the speed of fired arrows. Birgit narrowed her eyes and strained to see; perhaps it was only the night sky she glimpsed, opaquely translucent with distant stars that glimmered beyond a rising bank of fog. Yet she imagined there was a figure standing within that pillar of smoke, only a few metres away, and the vision almost stopped her heart. She gasped and almost screamed and her hand flew to her breast. In startled relief Birgit's realised that the vision was only a stone angel upon a raised plinth, a night bird screeched and flapped wildly from beneath the Seraph's broken wings. With a loud and nervous sigh, the girl hastily moved off, almost jumping the slabs of stone to put the cemetery and the whorl of mist behind her.

The atmospheres suddenly grew colder and as she emerged on the far side of the graveyard she could see her own breath become visible in the air. She paused for a moment and pulled her shawl tighter about her shoulders, and then with faster pace she headed into the forest. Once again Birgit was plunged into a black void, a gloaming punctuated with shifting darknesses and mysterious sounds. The ground became steeper, sloping upward and then suddenly down and the girl bobbed and slipped sideways. As her heartbeat quickened so did her breathing. Or were the sounds of breathing and heartbeat from another who followed her in the blackness? She did not know and her nerves were starting to fray. All Birgit now understood was a horrible, throbbing fear. She abruptly broke into a run and the dark came after her. The shadows tracked her, followed close behind, darting and weaving to catch her up as Birgit ran and stumbled. A screech sounded at her shoulder and echoed through the forest. That screech merged with a ghastly flapping noise, as of beating wings and snapping twigs, and the servant girl almost screamed in her mounting terror and dropped her basket. Apples flew wide and rolled down the incline along with a wheel of yellow cheese and a bottle of cider. The wind snatched away the blue gingham cloth and the bottle of apple cider struck a stone and broke, fizzing white foam in the dappled dark. Birgit missed her footing and almost fell, twisting her ankle and throwing off her sandal. A pain shot through her ankle, making her wince, but she did not stop to retrieve her slipper but kept running, her bosom heaving, her skirts tangling about her legs. Disorientated she turned sharply and tried to double back, but all was confusion and her bearings were lost.

The shadows pursued her, moving and darting between the trees and Birgit ducked around a mountain ash and a sickle-like claw slashed at the bark. Birgit screamed. She plunged headlong into a screen of bracken and could not see clearly to where it was she fled, and the breathing sounds amplified and mutated into a nerve-jangling growl, a sound unlike anything the peasant girl had ever heard before, and it snarled and hissed and she in turn whimpered and cried out. Underfoot broken twigs and stones cut her feet and the dark closed in nearer, reaching out a shadow claw all covered with bristling hairs that glowed like phosphorescent spears in the moonlight. The claw raked at the girl's back, catching the fabric of her shawl and her blouse and tearing both away in one awful swipe. As the fabric ripped, Birgit screamed again, throwing up her hands to hold onto the rending material, but it was useless. Her breasts came tumbling out and Birgit tripped on a tree root. She landed heavily on the ground, the wind knocked from her lungs, her hair knotting up with vine and leaf and dirt. Little thorns in the vines scratched her white skin and drew thin traces of crimson across her exposed bosoms. The thorns stung with a sharp acid sting and the pain was intense, her deflated lungs struggling to gasp for the air as she tried to roll from her stomach over onto her back. Tears of pain welled up in her eyes. As Birgit lay prostrate, the darkness billowed above her and unfurled like a black banner and then it fell upon her, flipping her body over as if she were a rag doll and pinning her down with its weight. Birgit glimpsed thunderbolts flashing in hot blue eyes, large eyes, huge eyes, frightful and fiery, and eyes that were bisected through their red centres by narrow black irises. The shadow gaped, studded with two half-moons of ivory teeth, long and sharp and curved and yellow. It was a slavering maw larger than a wolf's mouth, snapping at her throat. With a shriek of terror, Birgit struggled, but she flailed against a hideous monstrosity, the incarnation of a creature beyond the feral and the base. It gave a guttural howl and its teeth flashed down in a tide of sticky spit and it bit deeply into the peasant girl's breast. Upon the strike Birgit knew agony, and her breath expelled in one final, splintering scream. A fountain of blood cascaded from her torn flesh and coloured the darkness scarlet, and Birgit knew the intensity of suffering as she died, as her life blood sated the damned, as the thing fed upon her till it bloated and pulsed like a foul and disgusting leech.

Ebhardt had been riding for an hour, taking byways and shortcuts through the woods to quicken his journey home. He was tired and agitated and he wanted to be back at the General's estate before the moon rose to its zenith. On a secluded forest path Ebhardt reined his mount to a halt. He raised his head and turned about, the horse snorted and shook its mane. From out of the dark he imagined he had heard the echo of a scream, a woman's scream, coming from somewhere close by. He waited for a short moment listening intently, but the forest was resolutely hushed all about as if it were daring him to make reply. Ebhardt could not track from which direction the scream had come and he looked about in the darkness, facing all points of the compass. He shivered and part of his insides went cold. Carl did not like the notion of admitting even the faintest trace of fear, but right here, right now, there was fear in the night. What made the truth of this even more explicit was the absence of bird calls, and there were no other noises either, no snuffling or crackling foliage, not even the wind. There was only that one and dreadful shriek. Impatient to be gone his mare pawed at the ground. It seemed as if Ebhardt involuntarily communicated his fear to the horse. His mind was gripped by a brief paralysis and as it struggled with the physical processes of thought and movement, it also knew a horrible reality that chilled his core.

Out there in the dark of the forest were the terrifyingly real possibilities of some fearful manifestation made palpable, the medium by which Laura Spielsdorf had met her doom, and it was close enough to molest and destroy. He sensed its nearness, and he knew it mocked him. Rather than acknowledge his fear Ebhardt gently tapped his knee against the mare's belly, the stirrups jangling faintly, and the horse resumed a slow canter, though Carl wanted nothing better than to gallop away as fast as he could. The woods were dark and silent again and the chill air swirled about him, his travelling cloak flapping in the wind. As he passed through the shadows Ebhardt's mind eventually eased and he told himself reassuringly that he wasn't even sure he had heard anything at all, it was probably his tired imagination. He'd be back at General Spielsdorf's residence soon and if there were any report of a mischief afoot this night, well, he'd hear about it soon enough.

Chapter 6

A Tender Friendship

In which a coach overturns outside the Morton house and how Emma finds a new friend in the beautiful Carmilla.

In the weeks that followed, Emma Morton had once again resigned herself to her solitary life and on this bright and sunny morning, sitting in the conservatory that overlooked the garden, the greenhouse and the great oak tree, Emma was taking breakfast alone. She had likened her past two years unto the most horripilate journey into darkness that a young woman could ever take. Though now, and with cautious reserve, she had decided that it was time for the darkness to go away. There was too much darkness in her life, too many shadows and too many people who failed to see that she had grown up. With her friend Laura dead, there was little hope that another such friend would come along, a friend with whom to share a laugh, a confidence, and trust. Although Emma swore to herself that this time, she would not become the victim of melancholy but rather she would be strong and deal with her tragic loss in a fashion that befitted an adult woman.

It was strange how upon this thought, that the forbidden text of 'The Lustful Turk, or Lascivious Scenes from a Harem' once again invaded her head. There was the seed of an idea in that tale that transcended the lurid and the solicitous, it sang to her of something else, of her own vital being, and of the reality of her own needs now that childhood was abandoned. It made her feel, quite astutely, the lonely life she had been living, and it amplified her isolation. Emma's fixation was with the novel's sexual adventures that took place in a foreign land somewhere unimaginable and distant. Right now, in foreign Stiria, wasn't she far away and distant, and what awaited her innocence, a vile ravishment by a dozen mountebanks? Emma had to admit that in the land of the Turk was to be had an adventure that a proper English girl should never be made endure. The sexual episodes in the story had suggested both pleasure and pain and spoke explicitly of things that one could do but for them being horribly indecent. How such extremes of reaction were to combine, taking the English girl out of her conventions, ignorant in the male world, and forcing unthinkable domination, debauchery and fornications upon her, only made Emma's thoughts more confused. She was taking a solitary breakfast of oats and toast and fresh orange juice. There was no one else about, not even Mademoiselle Perrodon had risen yet, to engage in idle chatter, and Emma took the opportunity of privacy to pause in reflection. Some of the passages she had read from 'The Lustful Turk' were terrible and yet thrilling; and as she recalled it vividly the morning about her closed and the only vision in her eye was a gilded room in a rich tent in a sea of sand, a desert place where she saw them, the Turk and the submissive English slave together.

'…he had stripped naked...and placed me on the couch, my stomach underneath... he divided my thighs to their utmost extension...'

Emma became only half aware that the morning sun was beaming hotly through the conservatory glass and that a light sweat had begun upon her brow.

'…he got upon me and strove to penetrate the obstacle nature had placed in his way...'

Emma moaned lowly and bit down upon her lower lip. It was difficult to picture the sexual position being described or the extent of the congress as it took place. What would that obstacle be, was connextion from the rear being described? It seemed to Emma that the act being performed upon the couch might be aberrant, but having never been with a man Emma was ignorant and hardly understood what was considered sexually normal. Though the act of being penetrated from behind certainly did not seem normal it was no less as fascinating as it was disgusting. Her own biology was curiously awakening and despite this lurid and perverse idea, perhaps the message was that she needed to understand the power of her own body, to become more in control of her sex instead of letting the few men who populated her existence treat her as if she had no agency of her own. That of course might have been wishful thinking, for the want of being strong and in control of your own life implied somehow that you were an abomination to the female species.

What 'The Lustful Turk' excited was her desire to be in love, to experience lust, to know a man's hard flesh, his penis, his claiming of her innocence. Emma was beginning to realise something else too, and that was the attractiveness of her own body. In fact, she now vaguely understood the tacit allure of all female flesh, of how female flesh was the catalyst that made male flesh hard and wanting and uncontrollable. There was an undeniable power to be had in that attraction but this sudden thirst in her body was still so alien. It had been dormant only because it had been denied and she reasoned that there was a time and place for reserve but there was also a time to acknowledge the changes, the transformation of her body from young girl to young woman. In her mind, she openly admitted to herself that Carl Ebhardt made her pulse race. His was a gloriously handsome face and his body was a finely muscled physique, the perfect image of a Greek hero, with strong forearms and wide chest, and there was a hardly concealed decadence that lurked under his beautiful skin and shone in his burning eye. It was a secret knowledge that he had telegraphed in a look, that he had noted her white skin and the shape of her body and then nonchalantly pretended that he had not. Such were the ways of the flesh, thought Emma, and to lie with Ebhardt might bring the newly awakened senses unto stupefaction. His lips would surely deliver a long and maddeningly delightful kiss and then if he should place her over the couch and divide her thighs to their utmost extension...

The flame of ardour had been lit now and Emma did not even think to douse it. Yet therein that forbidden carnal epistolary pulsed a litany of other sexual pleasures and depravities that the decadent, clever, crafty and unscrupulous rouées and their debauched amours all performed. Why, there were even abuses by the clergy, with one vividly descriptive passage that Emma read time and again until its description had become a vision burned into her mind.

'A shriek proclaimed the change in her state; the ecstasy seized me and I shot into the inmost recesses of the womb of this innocent and beautiful child as copious a flood of burning sperm as ever was fermented under the cloak of a monk…'

Never having read such a thing in her life, or been able to conjure such sexual proclivity to imagination, Emma now experienced a terrible excitation at the liberal and violent acts of love described, of sex that danced with religion. Such blasphemies were almost beyond anything she could have previously imagined and had it not been for the addition of those lurid illustrations then Emma might still have been at a loss as what to think. There were women in that story who not only drank from the poisoned bowl of lust but also received sensual gratifications that were beyond the bounds of nature. Some of the acts the book described even denounced male pleasure, and these women performed unchaste acts with other women and oft in the presence of curious spectators. Moreover, the men were obliged to promiscuity and to satisfy their worldly necessities by performing abundantly first with their tongues and then with their members. Emma blushed, but the thought of it all made her head reel, the contemplation of how male flesh tasted, how it smelled, its strength and its softness, its vital essences, its 'burning sperm', and the wildest phantasies of profane intercourse performed by a man of God. It made her think of Ebhardt's body, hard as iron and soft as satin and how that body might look without clothes on. Like a Roman soldier in a passionate rage, naked in a realm of lust, she imagined that Ebhardt deflowered her, just like that priest had deflowered the maiden, and in that voluptuous realm, the thrusting priap conquered her virtue and her honour. In lust none could be spared, not wife, mother, daughter, son nor husband, for all and sundry at some point gave over to the bacchanal of the flesh. This knowledge should have disgusted and repelled her moral senses, or so she told herself, but why was that not so? A tiny fire had begun flaring up in her belly and it had somehow become hotter here in the breakfast room.

Emma put down her spoon and pushed away the bowl of oats. No, she could not let that flame go out but rather she promised herself that she would fan that flame and keep it alight for should it be extinguished so then would be her life. What would her life amount to if she were never to meet anyone apart from those of whom her father approved? Should she remain shut away in this big old country house in a land as alien to her as was the moon in the firmament far above, or was there adventure to be risked? Emma did not like the idea of being lonely forever, of being trapped and wasting her youth at the behest of men who did not understand or care about your needs. Of course, the death of Laura had been a shock and its pain had hurt, but Emma still had her life to consider and it might be time to acknowledge that fact. Was it so improper to feel attracted to your dead friend's fiancé, to wonder what his flesh might feel like, might taste like? Just as she pondered upon this, her reverie was interrupted by her father. He called to her a 'good morning', although she did not hear, flinching like a startled rabbit when he came up to her side and placed his hand upon her shoulder.

'Emma,' he repeated 'are you dreaming, dear?'

'Oh, father,' she replied, 'I'm sorry. I was miles away.' Her cheeks flushed scarlet.

'Still upset about Laura?' He was looking directly in her face but he was as docile and as distant as always.

'Yes, of course,' Emma responded, 'but I know that I must accept her death, even as much as it saddens me, for nothing can bring her back to us.'

Morton gave a little shrug, and with a suppressed grunt and a passive smile he pulled out a chair and sat down.

'Of course, there was nothing I could have done, nothing anybody could do,' Emma continued, her normal colouring beginning to return.

'I don't want to be sad today, father, so let us not talk about that. Shall we go riding through the glade and up by the lake? You might like to look for a good spot from which to fish.'

'Why, what a splendid idea! I might like to go fishing. I have heard nothing but good reports about the quality of the salmon.'

'Good,' said Emma, and though she scarce believed her father would go fishing she was glad for the excuse to finish at the breakfast table. 'I'll go and get into some riding clothes.'

'Yes, dear, I will see you down soon?'

'Give me ten minutes father.'

Emma leaned forward and excused herself, and as she rose, she placed a token kiss on his forehead and ran upstairs to her room. Morton watched her till she was gone and then after a moment that took him nowhere outside of his own head, he looked down at his empty plate. The family cat, Gustav, padded softly up to his ankles and began to rub and purr. Mr. Morton stretched down and scratched the cat under its chin. Then, as if suddenly realising that he should eat, he reached over and took the silver cover from a tray. Eggs and bacon peeked temptingly from beneath.

'Delicious,' he thought, selecting a crispy rasher. 'A positively English breakfast!'

Gustav jumped lightly up upon Emma's vacant chair and looked at Morton with big pleading green eyes.

A groom steadied the brown mare, holding the reins strap in one hand and helping Morton up into his saddle with the other. The horse barely moved a muscle. Emma was already seated side saddle on a black mount, the long veil of her hat lifting in the light breeze and wafting gently over her shoulder. She was impatient to be off and be away from the stuffy confines of the house. Mademoiselle would be complaining soon that Emma should be at her lessons and so the young woman wished to be gone from the residence. The stable boy led both horses from under the ivy and into the carriageway then stepped aside. Morton's gaze was set on the path ahead and he did not speak to his daughter other than to exchange a few uninspiring pleasantries; and Emma was happy enough that silence rode with them.

They rode slowly along the way and then broke off into the park, picking up pace as they passed under the trees, scattering a carpet of sere leaves in their wake. They cantered over a spread of bracken and conifer needles and into the woods, the view to the Alps screened off as the way grew steeper. Up the ascending landscape they trotted, the trees stretching to the sky, and the sky was glimpsed in shards of lapis lazuli in the bright and warm morning sunshine. The light from the star bathed Emma's pale cheeks with a rosy glow and her face resembled a great big valentine. She had donned a neat but dowdy fawn coloured riding skirt, white lace blouse and chocolate jacket, but the gilded sunlight struggled feebly to enliven its sombre tone. Astride her coal-dyed horse her pretty heart-shaped face, wrapped up in hat and veil and her dun coloured wardrobe made her almost disappear against the achromatic backdrop of silver-brown trunk and branch and verdigris leaf in shadow. In silence, the two rode on through the forest, Emma searching furtively for a glimpse of a doe or a fox or a rabbit, anything to distract her from partaking in a pointless conversation with her father. She had no need to fear his intrusion into her thoughts, for his mind was thankfully far away, somewhere in Vienna no less, and at length as they trotted on they came down a gentle slope onto the main byway. All about was oddly still and Emma and her father, both in a state of nescience, were made suddenly aware that the birds and forest animals had all fled at the sounding approach of hoofs. It was not the noise of their own horses clopping that had caused the abrupt silence but rather the thunder of a madly approaching team and carriage.

What followed happened so quickly that the duration of the action was but the passing of seconds. However, to the Morton's, as they beheld the spectacle, every detail was as vivid and as violent and rapidly accomplished as was the flash of a lightning bolt or the crack of a whip. As the black vehicle cut around a bend in the road, it plunged into a rapid charge and rushed through a gate of opposing cedar trunks that flanked the way. Emma saw a postilion mounted on the drawing horse to the left as he was thrown back in his saddle. The man vainly reached out with desperate fingers to grasp the reins of the horse that ran alongside. His efforts to induce the panicked animal into breaking its unexpected speed were futile, and the coach pitched about on its springs, lunging forward and swaying perilously from side to side. It was clear that the driver had lost control of his team and that an imminent disaster was but seconds away. There was a shout to the 'Jehu', but he was beyond hearing as he pulled back on his reins, and the call was to no effect. The cry had burst from one of the coachmen at the rear, a shout of surprise that sounded above the thunder of the pounding hoofs, and at the same time the shriek of a woman tore from the carriage as it plunged forward into its mad dash. The cry rent the morning air. The sound made Emma Morton's blood run cold and she pulled her own mount to an abrupt halt on the side of the incline as the carriage drew parallel and shuddered in the rutted way. Swept along as if in the rushing winds of a tempest, the scream became an echo and the echo joined with the grinding roar of the spinning wheels as they ran into a deep and muddy groove in the road. As the carriage careened to a smashing stop and turned over upon its left side, two of the coachmen mounted at the rear were thrown violently from their perches, tumbling through the air in their bright red liveries, one dashing his head upon a projecting rock, the other somersaulting in the mud. The third avoided serious injury by leaping into the air, and thus propelled, he landed in the roadside and tumbled into a copse. The coachman doubled over but held his seat, gathering the reins into a fist as the horses became agitated and vocal. Mr. Morton was the first to jump down from his saddle and run to their aid. Emma waited on her horse in a paralysis of suspense.

'Are you, all right?' Morton called as he ran up to the coachman, but the man's reply was only a muted affirmation, almost unintelligible and foreign sounding, and lowly muttered. Turning his back upon Morton as he spoke, the coachman rushed to tend his team. Not questioning this abrupt dismissal, Morton strutted briskly up to the dangerously listing vehicle. As he reached for the door handle he noted a family crest embossed on the panel, it was the head of a dragon-like monster perched above another larger monster's head, both imprinted onto a royal blue shield. Both creatures had red tongues that protruded from fanged, beaked jaws. On the right flank of the shield, beside the monsters was marked a large golden 'K' in a fancy Gothic font. The motto conveyed a suggestion of strength through terror, Morton was not sure to what house the golden capital might have belonged, but regardless he understood immediately that the coat of arms insinuated that the carriage was the property of someone wealthy or important. Bending and thrusting at the handle Morton managed to open the door and the slim white and trembling hand of a woman emerged from its angled and dim interior.

'Is anyone hurt?' Morton asked with concern as he leaned forward.

The coachman who had struck his head staggered upright and clasped his bleeding forehead and nodded that he was all right. Blood dripped through his fingers and its scarlet stain disappeared into the like coloured fabric of his tunic. The woman's hand grasped at Morton's, a great blue coloured stone in a smith-worked silver ring adorned her third finger, glinting in the morning sunlight as if it had stolen a clutch of stars from the firmament. Her hand was cold. Mr. Morton helped the woman to get out of the carriage but she was trembling in her step. She was a fine and handsome female, one of obvious regal bearing and dressed in black with a white veil covering her head. She leaned upon Morton's arm and her breathing was rapid. In her upset she appeared confused, and she squinted in the light as if it hurt her eyes. With uncertain step, the woman stumbled toward the shade beneath a spreading cedar, leaning upon Morton's arm and whimpering. The woman's attire was black like a thunder cloud, and so dressed she might have been travelling to attend some grim occasion, or returning from some equally unhappy event. Her garb blended with the dappled shadows. The woman shook her head as if to right her thoughts, and in her disorientation, she turned away from Morton and stretched out her hand toward the tilted carriage.

'Quickly, you fools!' she reprimanded loudly. 'My niece!' In sudden horror, her eyes grew wide with fear.

'Emma!' Morton called urgently, summoning his daughter from her mount. The girl quickly slid from her saddle and hurried to the stricken coach, running across the muddy road as fast as she could, wet earth sticking to her boots. Despite the horror of the situation Emma thought that it was all terribly exciting. It was not every day that a coach overturned outside your home, right in front of your eyes!

'My house is nearby,' reassured Morton, guiding the woman in black to a fallen log under the shadows of the trees. She clung to his riding cloak with shaking fingers, trembling all over as she settled upon a gnarled trunk, unable to calm her nerves. 'You must rest a while,' Morton insisted.

'No, no, my journey is imperative!' The woman let go of Morton's clothes and began flailing in the air, as if giving orders to her driver and coachmen by mere signal alone. They were scurrying like rats to drag the horses forth and pull the carriage from the rut and back to level ground. There did not seem to be any damage to the spokes and the iron wheel rims were not bent, no axle was fractured. As the men hauled and heaved, the woman turned her eye from Morton and addressed the servants. 'Quick! Quick!' she cried, distress draining the colour from her immaculate features. There was a wild and bewildered look in her eyes. Emma had come up to the coach and had stooped within the frame of the gaping door. A shaft of sunlight streaming in through the opposite window revealed the shape of someone huddled into the deepest corners of the velvet shadows, shivering in a cloak of deep ultramarine. Emma glimpsed the fleeting image of a face the colour of fine porcelain, but a face no less as pale as a ghost. A slender and ivory hand with shaking fingers clutched at the heavy fabric and held it in close. It was a young woman but she said not a word. The image of the poor trembling creature upset Emma, and she turned back to her father.

'Father,' she said, finding her own voice beginning to tremble, 'she's quite shocked. We must take her home with us.'

'Oh no, no, I cannot!' interjected the woman in black, her eyes narrowing under the white veil as if the sun were hurting her eyes. 'My brother is dying. I cannot delay.' The woman held Mr. Morton with an imploring gaze. It was for as short a moment as is the passing of a breath, but it was a look wherein the colour black became mixed with the bleach of white, where the eve and the morn collided, and where the will was coerced with an unspoken command eliciting consent from the flesh, and consent was given even as it was duped.

'My name is Morton. May I be allowed to suggest that your niece...' The man glanced towards the coach although he had not yet seen the face of the girl.

'Carmilla...' The name flowed like music from the woman's rosy lips and the words, soothing music but curiously mysterious.

'Carmilla...' repeated Morton falteringly, '...would be more that welcome to stay with us while you continue your journey.'

The woman shook her head, scintillates darting from the droplet pearls and diamonds swaying at her ears.

'Oh, no, no, no, it is impossible!'

A bustle of activity from the men in bright red livery had begun to ease the groaning carriage out of its ditch. The horses, now settled gave tension to their braces and the harness straps began to tighten. Then Morton looked upon Emma and Emma looked upon the mysterious woman. Her look was that of one pleading, but one who could not speak and an electric suspense passed between all three.

'My daughter would be grateful for the company.' Morton suggested, and Emma's doe eyes widened with surprise, her cheeks dimpling deeply, and her pretty lips drawing up into a wide smile. This could not be happening she told herself. Why, only a few short minutes ago she had been seated at her breakfast table pondering whether she would ever have another friend to visit. It was as if God had chosen to hear her most intimate wish and here he had assigned someone unto that purpose, right out of the blue, to share a short while together and bring happiness. The veiled woman acquiesced all too quickly and she too smiled. 'You are too kind,' she told Morton, and as she spoke the words, Emma gasped aloud for joy. She turned back to the carriage just as it was beginning to lurch forward.

'You are to stay with us!' she exclaimed excitedly to the girl in the coach.

As the carriage moved slowly forward into the full glare of the sun it once again became level, and Emma had to make pace to keep alongside the open door. The girl within huddled in the dim interior, almost folding herself up into the deep blue velvet upholstery. She was trembling violently, drawing her slim white arm beneath the folds of her midnight cloak, so that her bare skin avoided the daylight. Emma glimpsed the young woman's beautiful, pale face, ringed with a corona of blurry light, with a radiance that burned about the cloak's hood, golden, white, and hazy. It was a finely chiselled and sculpted visage, one that might have been wrought by a master sculptor from the most flawless alabaster, and yet its features slipped quickly and elusively into tenebrous hues. Emma could not see the girl's face completely for the shade within the carriage was deep, but it revealed enough in the shifting light to glimpse glorious eyes like blue jewels and red lips like garnets. In response, those red and exquisite lips arched into the vague ghost of a trusting smile and her splendid gaze fixed upon Emma and looked nowhere other. With that smile began a tender friendship between Emma and Carmilla, but who might have known that this friendship, though glorious in the stark light of day, was to take a sinister turn by night?

Mademoiselle Perrodon and Emma were seated opposite each other at a round French lacquered walnut table in the drawing room. Mademoiselle was pointing to her own lips. Slouching in her chair, Emma was watching but hardly felt like responding.

'Die munt,' said she in bored response to Mademoiselle's prompt, and then Mademoiselle Perrodon pointed to both of her eyes.

Emma looked at her uncomprehendingly, her expression as listless, dulled and as impassive as a hind's. This afternoon's German lesson was boring and dreary and Emma did not feel at all up for education. Why she had to sit down to drawing room classes and learn a language she thought positively harsh and vulgar she could scarce understand. Mademoiselle would force her to take up the quill next and begin writing the words down as an exercise. English to German, German to English, over and over again and to what end? Well, all that on another day, but not this day! Why, merely a few hours ago, a carriage had overturned outside of her home and a beautiful stranger had come to stay with them! How Emma was supposed to concentrate on lessons under such circumstances she did not know, but despite the calamity of a few moments the accident had proven most exciting. It had not taken the coachmen but a few minutes to put the vehicle to right again and for the mysterious woman in the white veil to speed off on her vital journey. Why, no one had even asked after her name! Wherever the woman's brother was dying had not been divulged either and it seemed now to be in poor taste to inquire of the recuperating niece where that destination might be.

Carmilla had been promptly invited into their home and the spell she had immediately cast was in the undeniable physical truth that she was the most beautiful creature Emma Morton had ever seen in all her young life. The girl was possessed of eyes the colour of sapphires and the most glorious cascade of thick auburn hair; and now that she appeared to have recovered from the shock of the accident and was standing about a metre away, Emma could not help but be captivated by her beauty. Carmilla stood by the door, with a book opened in her hands and she was smiling wistfully. She looked up from her page and cast that smile in Emma's direction. At the speed of light and upon some unknowable point in space and time their gazes collided. Emma felt a strange and inexplicable feeling rush through her young body. Noting that Emma was not concentrating and that her thoughts were obviously preoccupied with other things, Mademoiselle made a little noise in her throat. The noise drew Emma's attention back to the moment.

Emma responded quickly, 'Die Augen,' she said, looking back to her lesson book, but she knew that her Governess' patience was wearing thin. Mademoiselle paused and her face was stern. Their eyes met, both challenging the other, Mademoiselle silently reprimanding.

Mademoiselle spoke firmly, 'Die Augenbraue,' and waited for Emma's response.

'This is tedious,' thought Emma, 'and I have not the patience for it today.' Here she deliberately stalled. 'Die Augenbraue... die Augenbr...' and it was much to Mademoiselle's chagrin. Of course, it was easy to say 'Die Augenbraue' but Emma could not be bothered, and besides, if you played silly then you were not expected to prolong difficult moments. Everyone would tire, just as Mademoiselle was tiring now. Why, she could hardly hide her growing exasperation. Mademoiselle was losing patience but Emma did not care. All she really wanted to do was talk to Carmilla. From the moment that she had looked upon the beautiful stranger hiding in the dim interior of the coach, Emma had been filled with joy and with curiosity. In haste Carmilla had been taken back to the house and ensconced along with a heavy trunk full of her belongings in a room upstairs, and made comfortable. The girl's aunt had departed quickly, but with a promise to return as soon as was practical under the special circumstances of her journey. In her room Carmilla had stayed for the rest of the day, alone and resting while Emma virtually roiled with suspense downstairs. Mademoiselle Perrodon had then seen fit to continue the day as if nothing untoward had happened, and thus the German lesson had begun. The late afternoon sun was already retreating before eve's shadows when Carmilla came downstairs.

Although she walked slowly and languidly, she appeared to be in good health and her face was no longer pale. The fright had left her and she smiled warmly as she came into the drawing room. Emma leapt from her chair and ran up to her house guest. Carmilla embraced her gently and kissed her cheek, but Mademoiselle Perrodon allowed Emma only a small break from her tutorage. For a short while the two girls gossiped and Carmilla's lovely personality shone forth with a bright luminance that kept Emma smiling and spellbound. After this brief meeting, the lesson had resumed and Carmilla had looked about the library and found a book of poetry by one Felicia Heman. With the book, the girl had decorously reclined upon a chaise; a vision as intoxicatingly lovely as any Hellenic sculpture rendered in flawless marble, and opened her volume.

'Oh ne'er in other climes though many an eye

Dwelt on your charms, in beaming ecstasy;

Ne'er was it yours to bid the soul expand

With thoughts so mighty, dreams so boldly grand.'

Carmilla read the words aloud, and paused to note Emma's response and Mademoiselle's disapproval. The Governess pursed her lips and threw Carmilla a censuring look. The girl only smiled back, and glancing down at her book, and indolently she turned a page. An interminable moment of silence followed.

'Die Augenbraue,' Mademoiselle insisted, and her tone implied that she would brook no further interruption. Emma cast a trapped look in Carmilla's direction. Mademoiselle knew that Emma had undergone an exciting morning and that what she wanted most was to be with her new friend and chatting, but today's German lesson was going to proceed regardless of the day's earlier events, and Emma needed to understand and respect the discipline of learning. Emma on the other hand had other ideas and she did not wish to learn German this afternoon. What was the use of it anyway? So that she could talk to the servants? Mademoiselle spoke three different languages, perhaps she should converse with everyone in Emma's stead. Emma lightly admonished herself for her harsh thoughts, but regardless it did not seem at all fair.

'I can't say it.' Emma said pathetically, putting on a most apologetic expression. Mademoiselle shook her head and was upon the point of reprimanding the girl for not really trying, but then she thought better of it and simply blinked her disapproval. It was then that Carmilla, still clasping her book, walked gracefully over to the table and bobbed her head down before Emma Morton.

Carmilla spoke softly, encouragingly, 'Die Augenbraue,' her voice tinged with a strangely lilting but indefinably exotic accent, and then in English: 'The eye brow.'

'Oh,' was all that Emma could intone as their eyes met. Emma thought that she might swim in those eyes because they were so blue, like the blue of a cloudless sky in summer, like the blue of a placid mountain lake. Carmilla's thick auburn hair tumbled over her shoulders, the length of it curling in waves. She smelled of a gentle and fragrant floral perfume and her lips were so red. As she spoke, her breath was sweet.

'German is so difficult,' Emma professed, half bored, half mesmerised. Today's lesson was a basic dialect indeed but it was really the happenings of the day that had put a difficult slant on things and Emma found herself now unable to suppress the morning's stimulating events.

'Nevertheless, you must try,' Mademoiselle interjected with an exasperated sigh.

Carmilla nodded her agreement. 'How many languages do you speak?' Emma wanted to ask the girl. 'Because, Carmilla, you speak German so well! Did learning it never bore you?' Carmilla gave a wry smile as if she had read Emma's thoughts.

'I wish I did not have to take this lesson,' said Emma quietly, and resentfully, yet though she said the words to herself she did not really care if Mademoiselle heard or not. 'In fact, I wish I were far away from here.'

'Where might 'far away' be?' asked Carmilla, who had indeed heard, and she was looking into Emma's eye with an inquisitive frown etched in her forehead.

'Why, I would be the happiest girl in the world if I were on a blue river somewhere sitting and waving from the deck of that boat.' Emma pointed to the ivory carving that commanded its own display table close to where Carmilla had reclined on the sofa.

'Not on that boat, I hope!' remarked Carmilla in surprise, arching her eyebrows and shaking her head in mock judgment.

'Why ever not?' asked Emma, and Mademoiselle Perrodon smiled at the irony, as if she knew a secret knowledge that she had never imparted to anyone and tried to indicate with a slight gesture of her hand that the beautiful new guest be quiet. Carmilla countered immediately.

'Why? Because that is a Cantonese Pleasure Barge and only ladies of questionable morals would be waving from that deck!'

Emma blanched in shame at her ignorance. She looked at the ivory model that had arrived some months ago in one of her father's consignments, the same crate from which had emerged 'The Lustful Turk', and she did not know what to say. What had her father been thinking when he had purchased that barge, or was he truly ignorant of the origin of the ivory carving? How could Carmilla, so young and pretty, know of such worldly things? The thought that Carmilla had knowledge of prostitutes, and that she knew of how such strange cultures as those of faraway China regarded these colourful women shocked Emma deeply. This left Emma aghast and she coloured with embarrassment. She attempted to return the conversation to the cessation of her German lesson, hoping that her foolish remark and girlish naivety would be disregarded. She implored Mademoiselle with a transparently wounded gaze.

'I'll try my lesson again tomorrow!' Emma groaned in humiliation, and then she switched her expression to a sweet but calculated smile. Carmilla laughed quietly at the manipulative humour of the situation. 'Well,' thought Emma to herself, 'if I am considered ignorant and I must simper to have my way, then so be it.' Her cheeks dimpled broadly and her eyes twinkled and the stain of shame left her cheeks.

'All right,' Mademoiselle finally conceded, knowing that it was useless to continue. She began packing up the books, the quill, and the ink. Today's lesson had proven futile. 'You had better get ready for dinner.' She made no attempt to conceal the truth that she was annoyed. 'Your father will be home soon.'

'Yes!' rejoiced Emma, exalting in her triumph and she sprang up from her chair and skipped from the table. As Carmilla watched her go there was a curious look upon her beautiful face that Mademoiselle did not see, but it was a look that hovered somewhere between adoration and hurt. She raised her hands, still clasping her book, in a gesture as if to hold Emma back. The stranger watched the young girl fly to the stairs and run up to her room and only when Emma had closed her bedroom door did Carmilla turn to look upon Mademoiselle Perrodon and she in turn was looking at her.

The evening came on quite rapidly and Emma was eager to sit down to dinner. There would be so much to talk about with Carmilla that she could hardly wait. She had dressed in a pretty white frock and slippers to match and now she found herself paused in the hall outside of her bedroom. She had every intention of going straight downstairs but the temptation to see her new friend was too strong an enticement and she turned and hurried back to Carmilla's door. Emma knocked.

'Who is it?' Carmilla called out.

'It's me, Emma.'

'Oh, do come in!'

Emma needed no further invitation and opened the door and went inside. Behind the door a rosewood screen was drawn up and Emma's pretty face made a cameo in its open top panel. The longer bottom panels were of fine Italian tapestry and concealed the beautiful stranger at her ablutions. As Emma closed the door and walked past the screen, she barely noticed that Carmilla was reclined naked in a hip-bath. The lovely guest's auburn hair was pulled up and pinned high so that it did not get wet, her naked alabaster skin glistening with beads of warm water, her breasts just above the waterline. Carmilla watched Emma as she ran up to the bed. There on the quilt were laid out half a dozen dresses and Emma's eyes grew larger in wonder. One dress was vibrant scarlet, one was emerald green, and two of the other dresses were coloured iridescently different shades of blue. Draping over the edge of the bed was a dress the colour of a frozen lake in winter. Another was dark like the sea where its deeps are sky dyed. All were made of silk.

'Those dresses,' Emma gasped, 'aren't they beautiful!'

She reached forward and picked up the darker gown. It felt cool like shadows and smooth and soft as it slid between her fingers.

'You may wear one, if you want to.' Carmilla smiled as she invited, squeezing a sponge over her skin. She raised her knees in the bath and the rose scented water rippled with light, frothy bubbles.

'May I, really?' Emma exclaimed, not believing that she could have ever worn such a sheer but lovely garment. Why, if you were to wear that everyone would be able to see everything that you possessed, and that you would be practically naked! Carmilla gave a little tinkling laugh and nodded her consent, watching as her companion placed the dress high against her bosom, admiring its cut and its sheer fabric. The dress seemed to cast its own spell, begging the girl to try in on.

'Emma,' said Carmilla, 'hand me that towel over there, please.'

'Yes,' said Emma, relinquishing the dark blue dress for just a moment and dropping it onto the bed quilt. She ran quickly to the dresser to acquiesce Carmilla's request. The girl in the bath put aside the sponge and stood up. How beautiful and exquisite was her body, all its lines and curves perfect. Water ran in beaded crystal droplets over her full and firm breasts, made little streams that trailed over her flat stomach and into the triangular thatch of fine silken down at her pubis. Emma thought it respectful to glance away as she extended the towel, but Carmilla did not seem at all shamed by the display of her naked body.

'Thank you,' Carmilla said, as she took the tasselled cloth and daubed at her white skin. Emma turned her attention back to the bed and marvelled at the dresses thereon. She could hardly imagine herself in one of those dresses, for they were vibrant and colourful and exotic, brilliant enough to make her own wardrobe seem positively dour. Carmilla stepped elegantly out of the hip-bath. When she had dried herself, the beautiful stranger draped the towel low about her hips and secured it with a tiny knot. The dark hairs below her belly were peeking over the line of the cloth. With slightly exaggerated movement Carmilla stepped up to the dressing table, her hips swaying, and she sat down at the stool before the mirror. She watched Emma in the looking glass. Over by the bed, Emma had proceeded to unbutton her own dress and to remove it, exposing a laced-up bodice that kept her bosoms tightly in place. Emma tossed her pretty frock aside and held the dark blue dress against her body, but Carmilla only laughed and began to unpin her auburn hair. As she ran her fingers through its tresses, her great blue eyes lit up with cobalt fire.

'Your dress is quite pretty,' she observed, spreading the filaments of her thick and abundant locks and teasing them out, 'but it's for a country girl.'

Emma paused for a moment and felt suddenly awkward. She had never stopped to consider how dowdy her wardrobe might have looked before.

'In town,' Carmilla continued, 'you must be more sophisticated.'

Emma gave an uncomprehending look and felt foolish that she should be so ignorant. She held the blue fabric out and stared at it, and Carmilla gave another laugh.

'You must take everything off!'

'Oh!' exclaimed Emma and she looked at her friend with wide eyes bursting in modest surprise. Taking off your clothes was not something you usually did in front of another person. How confident was Carmilla in her own skin that she could even advocate such a thing? The thought startled Emma, because for her entire life, she had been doing what other people expected and now it was being suggested that she do something completely unexpected. It seemed slightly rebellious but she was young and pretty and she wanted to feel young and pretty. Perhaps she should do just that, take everything off! She had been living in the shadows for far too long and this dress was perhaps as much a symbol of awakening as it was a symbol of change.

'Try it once,' coaxed Carmilla, who now picked up a brush and began to comb out her hair, her smile encouraging, and her eyes twinkling.

Emma stumbled for a moment, hesitating and weighing up the consequences of such a radical action. Everyone would be shocked if she went to dinner practically naked, but her mind became resolute. There seemed to be no room anymore for foolish embarrassment. Carmilla could be the point at which that change began and an echo of 'The Lustful Turk or Lascivious Scenes from a Harem' reverberated inside Emma's pretty head.

'You cannot put it over a bodice,' Carmilla insisted. 'It ruins the shape.'

Half of Emma wanted to be modern and yet the other half still felt constrained by antiquated convention. It was a moment of impasse, so in compromise she turned so that she did not face her beautiful guest and undid the laces of her bodice.

'All right,' Emma replied, blushing slightly but also feeling oddly liberated. Carmilla simply smiled.

'I have never worn anything like this before,' Emma confessed. 'I think it is so daring. What will my father say?' Emma tossed aside her chestnut locks, her fingers fumbling with the last of her laces, and then the bodice fell to the bed liberating the girl's lovely white breasts.

'Oh, he will appreciate it,' said Carmilla, her remark matter-of-fact and tinged by a hint of disgust, her eyes roving quickly over Emma's young body. 'Like all men.'

How Emma wished that her new friend had not said those words. 'Like all men' implied that men were all lechers, and that her father too was a letch, a pervert. It didn't seem right that one's own father should be noticing such things. If that is what all men really thought then young women were nothing more than pretty pieces of flesh to satiate men's base desires, a fact as evidenced by that forbidden novel. Emma did not want to believe that because in her young life she had yet to have the experience of loving a man. It made her feel slightly guilty because she had desired Carl Ebhardt, even though he was the amour of her deceased friend, Laura. Worse was the fact that such thoughts made her recall that illicit book that was hidden in her bedroom, and that brought with it the strong implication that its pages had always been meant for men like her father. Men who were nice on the outside, but salacious and lascivious within, and that was the strange paradox that made Emma go a little cold inside her heart. Perhaps putting on Carmilla's dress would be stepping one step too far too soon and men might do more than just notice, it might incite their uncontrollable lusts. A wavering confidence had reared its ugly head.

Reading her anxious thoughts Carmilla added: 'I think it will be too big.'

There was an urging, a playful insistence in Carmilla's voice, daring Emma to crack out of her enclosure, to emerge from her carapace and to disregard the prim voices of her cloistered upbringing.

'It's not,' returned Emma, pushing the image of her father and the outlawed text of the Harem to the back of her mind. What did it matter? Changes had already begun to alter her thoughts, and her body, and besides, she wanted to wear the dress. 'I'm sure it's not,' she said, shaking aside her hair so that her breasts were fully exposed.

'I'll show you.' She self-righteously figured that if anything, this daring act was at least as exciting as it seemed rebellious. Emma turned to face Carmilla and stepped into the garment, over the hem and within the volume of blue silk, and pulled the neckline high, turning around to show Carmilla that the gown was going to be a perfect fit. 'Look, Carmilla,' said Emma as she walked forward, stumbling upon the fabric's flowing length, and tripping on the hem. Carmilla laughed aloud.

'Ha!' Carmilla exclaimed and shook her head. 'What did I tell you? Take the other dress I have.' The beautiful stranger put down her brush and tossed her hair into a soft and ethereal swirl. Emma's step faltered cautiously as she walked to stand behind Carmilla at the dressing table. Across the girl's naked shoulder Emma tried to glimpse her own reflection and admire how she looked, but Carmilla's lush figure seemed to fill the entire frame of the silver glass. She had the most glorious figure, with firm and high breasts, and she did not appear lean, for no ribs were showing, but neither did she appear overly voluptuous. Her curves were perfect and her skin alabaster and Carmilla shook her head and placed one hand on Emma's forearm. She pointed to the light blue dress splayed out on the eiderdown.

'No!' Emma replied defiantly, this was the dress she had chosen and this was the dress she would wear.

'Yes,' Carmilla insisted, 'it's too small for me.'

'No, I don't want to.'

'Yes, you must! Take the other dress. I want you to…'

'No!'

Emma broke away and jumped onto the bed, the fabric slipping from her breasts as she lurched over quilt and mattress.

'I say take the other dress,' Carmilla cried, laughing at the same time, her fine breasts swaying, her hair rising in a gossamer cloud. Carmilla sprang after Emma, laughing as she chased the young woman about the room and Emma jumped again up onto the bed but this time Carmilla reached out and grasped her by the hips. The girl collapsed onto the covers in a fit of giggles, the knot pinning Carmilla's towel coming undone and falling aside. Carmilla's weight pressed Emma down, holding her beneath the coil of her fresh and clean skin, the tips of her nipples hardening as they brushed against Emma's. A strange moment of confusion flashed through Emma Morton's mind, it told her that she did not entirely like the other girl pressed against her so intimately and yet the physical import was not entirely objectionable. Carmilla leaned down closer so that her hair became a screen that covered Emma's oval face and there was a look in her eyes, a look that was desirous and full of fire and longing. The girl's lips were ever so close to her cheek and she could smell not only the scents from Carmilla's sweet exhalation but she could also feel something else, the length of the stranger's thigh parting and sliding in between her own. The hairs of Carmilla's sex were brushing against Emma's leg and the girl's centre was warm and damp. Confusion and even a little panic made Emma's heart begin to race, but Carmilla only gave forth an enigmatic smile. At that moment, the moment where Emma thought that she must throw the other girl off from her body or be suffocated, the dinner gong was sounded to summon the household to eat. Its long rolling echo sounded through corridor and room. The two young women were frozen in an erotically drawn tableau, and though Carmilla did not speak one single word, a thousand words had seemed to pass that bespoke to Emma of a chaotic mix of pleasure and repulsion. This passion was made up of a cloying bizarrerie and it hinted at the undefined boundaries of Sapphic lust. What had just transpired was for Emma a totally new experience that was converse to any notion that she might have previously held regarding strange love.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, Gretchin, the young housemaid, picked up the serving tray and gently rearranged the tureen and a plate. She cast a quick glance over her shoulder to see if cook was looking, but the woman was preoccupied with dessert and did not notice. Cook sometimes did things with haste and Gretchin felt a need to present things prettier by wiping away the careless drop of soup or to reposition a lid. She reasoned that if she made the extra effort then perhaps she would be noticed if the time ever came to better herself; besides, there was always the matter of pride. If you were sloppy in your work then you were sloppy in your head, and Gretchin would not want anyone to think that about her. Not that she should be passing judgments above her station, but when she thought about Miss Emma she began thinking about how it must be untidy inside that girl's head. Being pretty was certainly no excuse for being doted upon, although it obviously helped, but the young woman seemed to go through life in a daze, and living didn't seem to require of her any real mental effort at all. Oh, they said she suffered from melancholia, and maybe that was the excuse for abjuring all responsibility for yourself and your existence, but Gretchin didn't believe in wallowing. If you could live that way comfortably, then so be it, but Gretchin knew that there was no time in her servant's life for such things. Was Gretchin envious? She didn't think so. It was simply an observation and a deliberation upon how her class was so far removed from their class, and if you had any sort of brains why, if you were female, were you forbidden to use them? You had to secretly ensure the brains that you had! Surely Miss Emma could not possibly be as vacuous as she presented; why, you might as well be only a doll, a toy, and nothing more. No, Gretchin had no wish to be that, so envy hardly entered her equation. She worked hard and if she entertained mild criticisms of the wealthy folk she served she was never vocal on the subject. One always had to weigh up which side of the loaf you buttered, because it was more than a matter of principles but rather one of survival. Positions were hard to come by in this province and it was important to perform your best even though your personal politics may not be shared by others.

Gretchin backed out of the kitchen door and walked into the hall where Renton was sounding the gong. He was looking upstairs to the gallery but no one made an immediate appearance. Gretchin quickened her pace. As she passed the butler he gave her a leering smile and his eyes raked over her body. Under Renton's gaze Gretchin often felt uncomfortable, for his solicitude was not something that she encouraged. She found the butler quite unattractive, and although he presented professionally to his masters, his intentions to the serving staff often did not. Sometimes he would lasciviously comment on how she might have looked under the clothes she wore and sometimes he would touch her when she had not invited the touch. Yet there it was again, privilege. Even Mr. Renton, a man who was but a few steps up on the serving ladder above her lowly rung had a vast amount more privilege than her. He could comment and touch whereas she had to duck and weave. She knew that there were girls in the village tavern who seemed not to care about such matters, about what men wanted nor how male dominance ruled female lives. They let the men grasp and clutch and squeeze their bottoms and their breasts and all for the price of a stein, and she knew that other things transpired, monetary exchanges for a bit of play in the dark. Although she confessed that she was not half curious about what those girls did it still didn't push her any closer to wanting to find out. She had not met the man yet to whom she wished to surrender her virtue, but unfortunately there was little Gretchin could do to avoid being objectified.

The serving girl told herself resolutely that she was not ever going to acquiesce to Renton's advances upon her body. No, that was out of the question. He would say that looking didn't cost anything, but even in that he was wrong. To Gretchin it made her feel like she had no self-worth and no function other than to be a thing of amusement for men, and thus she prided her work and worked hard, for hard work would hopefully take her eventually far away from men like Renton. If she worked hard she reasoned that she might get to Vienna, to a different world, but that was a dream. Gretchin shook her head as she walked into the dining room, knowing that the situation could hardly change, shrugging as she placed the platter on the sideboard. This in turn opened another question: what would she be having for dinner tonight? Well, one thing was for certain, it would not be anything comparable to this repast, and if she openly dared criticise cook for her lack of presentation skills, well, she might be eating nothing at all. She sighed. The last echo of the gong was fading through hall and gallery. The Morton household and the new house guest would be down for dinner soon, it was time to start spreading out the cutlery.

Mr. Morton came from his room with a sprightly spring in his step, fastening the silver and agate link at his cuff as he came down the stairs. Renton was at the bottom of the staircase, reaching out a gloved hand to gently still the reverberating brass bowl of the gong. The butler had hoped to catch another glimpse of the beautiful guest who had taken shock after the carriage incident in the woods, but disappointingly Mr. Morton had been the first to appear. After the accident Renton had supervised Carmilla's installment in the guest room. It had afforded him a moment wherein he had carried the lovely Sylph, all wrapped in her indigo cloak, to her room, and the young woman had been trembling so much that he thought she might pass into a faint before they had laid her on the bed. The shiver of her body against his had given him a thrill. When he had placed her upon the bed, it was all that he could do to constrain himself from lying upon her. Peeling away the dark blue mantle revealed the girl was startlingly gorgeous, with that flow of thick hair and those red lips and skin so white it shamed the down of a swan. She was a dream incarnate in the flesh. It had been Renton, who had instructed Gretchin to keep watch during the afternoon, and Gretchin had been diligent, but Carmilla had gone to sleep and did not wake till much later.

At the bottom of the stairs Morton met Mademoiselle Perrodon, and they exchanged greetings.

'Good evening, Mr. Morton,' Mademoiselle said.

'Good evening,' Morton returned.

The gentleman felt quite happy and hungry too, for he had smelled the tempting aromas from the kitchen and it had made his stomach growl with anticipation. Mademoiselle looked quite pretty, but her personal style spoke plenty about her reserve; her gown was a dark grey-blue trimmed with silver brocade, and her bosom was laced up to the throat. No hint of skin was visible beneath her frock and she wore no jewellery apart from two tiny pearls that dangled from her ears. She looked stiff and repressed and unhappy, but Morton did not notice. Mr. Morton was about to comment on his degustatory eagerness when the sound of light chatter took their attention. Both he and the Governess looked up to the landing. Emma and Carmilla had emerged from the latter's room and were walking along the hall toward the stairs. Emma was smiling though she felt her heart tripping excitedly inside her bosom. She had put on one of Carmilla's dresses, a filament that had been spun from the blue of the celestial dome, and with slippers to match. A string of stars sparkled along the neckline and crisscrossed the bosom. Carmilla was dressed in a similar gown, sheer and almost transparent, but red, red as blood. She walked erect and with confidence, and as the two passed along the gallery she held Emma's hand. Mademoiselle's features creased into a frown of disapproval as Emma and Carmilla began their decent of the stairs. Mademoiselle's eyes became even bigger, bigger with as much disapproval as they did with surprise. She felt the words of reprimand swelling up in her throat, but they were stifled by the mere fact of Mr. Morton's own expression. His eyes had widened too, and they were full of the vision of Carmilla's loveliness… and of his daughter's too!

What manner of Djinn had been released from its lamp to shine its spectral light into his gaze and cloud up his vision! What had previously been hidden from his view was now blatantly on display, and that was the fact that his daughter had gone from dowdy to desirable in the short space of one autumnal afternoon. Morton found it difficult to take his eyes from either girl; first the splash of red and then the soft sky blue. He could see the obscured but evident roundness of breast and nipple and the way the female form pressed for liberty against each a sea of silk. He saw stars in their eyes and those stars engulfed his male senses and sent little ripples through his flesh. For one short moment, he was lost unto beauty until Mademoiselle reached over and touched his arm, bringing him back to the moment. The young women came to the last step at the bottom of the stairs.

'You look quite lovely,' Mr. Morton told his daughter, beaming his pleasure and nodding to Carmilla.

'Oh, thank you,' Emma responded, eyes cast downwards and affecting a state of demure supplication.

She gave a little curtsey, but it was all an act. Perhaps Carmilla had been right after all. All men seemed to be felled by beauty, brought down by desire. It was a new experience to understand this fact, to be in control, or at least know the weapons at your disposal, even if they were your breasts! If it was a little disgusting that her father should take such notice, and that notice be noticed by others, then it bespoke of what desires lay inside him and did not in any way diminish the new surge of power that she felt. There was something liberating in the idea that as a woman she did have a voice after all and that through her new friend, Carmilla, she was now beginning to find that voice. It was Mademoiselle whose frown did not fade.

'Well,' thought Emma, 'it doesn't matter because the dress in on now!'

Carmilla's pearly teeth flashed as her vermillion lips parted in a knowing smile. The group went in to dinner. Mademoiselle Perrodon sat at one end of the table and Mr. Morton sat at the other. Candlelight danced over the crisp white linen and washed a soft glow over Carmilla's beauty. The golden shades flitted upon her high cheekbones and burned upon the garnet of her lips. The young woman's face was as perfect as a sculpture, chiselled and wrought in the most exquisite line and curve, all blending with gold light and shadow. Her blue eyes seemed dreamy and she was staring at Emma. Emma had taken a seat directly opposite her house guest and waited for Gretchin to serve the tray of cold meats from the sideboard. Strange though, in her excitement Emma hardly felt hungry at all, for what she wanted the most was to talk and talk and talk with her new friend, talk until the night expired and the new day begun. Renton moved to the sideboard and Gretchin hurried around to the opposite side of the table to avoid the man. Mademoiselle Perrodon observed both actions out of the corner of her eye. She selected a slice of cold meat and gave Gretchin a strange look. The servant girl bit down on her lower lip and moved on with her tray to Mr. Morton. As Mademoiselle ate her repast she gave some thought to what had just occurred with Emma and Carmilla and why she was not happy. This girl, Carmilla, she was certainly something new, something different and possibly something difficult with which to contend. For a start, no one knew who she really was, and her aunt had whisked away so fast that there had been no time for questions. Perhaps it was justified that the Governess be a little suspicious. When your charge came down to dinner wearing next to nothing, well, that began a whole new debate about moral decency. The way of things may be different in Vienna or Paris, but not here. Such lapses in propriety were not what Mademoiselle Perrodon would advocate for an impressionable teenage girl.

If Mr. Morton condoned this new and liberated Emma then perhaps Mademoiselle need keep guard and watch that the situation did not get out of hand. She could not afford to have her growing authority undermined by a pretty young stranger, for that authority was already challenged by the wretched and sneering butler, Renton. Putting on a new dress did not mean that Emma was free to do as she pleased, and shirking her education was not something that Mademoiselle was not going to tolerate either. Young ladies were expected to behave like young ladies, and not to act like the women on a Cantonese pleasure barge! How she was going to deal with this new problem Mademoiselle did not know, because its boundaries were unclear, but one thing was for certain and that was that she would be in charge and that she would broach no disrespect. Mr. Morton was laughing with his daughter and Mademoiselle arched an eyebrow and took a sip from her own glass of wine. Carmilla looked away from Emma and once again observed Gretchin's discomfort, and Renton shrugged as if he were in ignorance of the maid's problem and took up two decanters of wine. He came up to the beautiful house guest and briefly hovered above her, his eyes peering down into the valley of her bosoms, the ruby that nestled between those breasts threw a fiery reflection into his gaze. He entertained the notion, albeit with barely concealed prurience, that he could be all too willingly dazzled by such a beauty, and most certainly should like to put his lips there, in between those creamy bosoms and taste those red and rosy cherries. The girl met his look and her eyes challenged him but he only simpered, politely asking which she preferred: 'Red or white, Miss?'

'Red, please,' Carmilla responded in a husky whisper, and Renton poured her a glass of claret. How invitingly red and warm the liquid had appeared as it flowed into the crystal, but when Carmilla eagerly tasted the wine it was disappointingly bitter and sour and spilled upon her tongue like acid. It was revolting and corrupt upon her palate, and Carmilla placed the glass hurriedly and heavily back upon the table. Her abrupt reaction did not escape Mademoiselle Perrodon, but Carmilla was in ignorance that Mademoiselle watched all, and her lips pursed in a tight knot to stem the desire to spit or to vomit. When the tide of revulsion finally washed out of her mouth, Carmilla sat quietly while the others ate, but not one spoonful of sustenance passed between her scarlet lips and the strangest agony, like some abhorrent perpetual hunger began clawing at her interior.

Chapter 7

Too Many Fairy Tales

In which Mademoiselle Perrodon is tested by Emma's illness, how Carmilla becomes more devoted to Emma and the midnight fate of the woodman's daughter.

The moon alone bore witness, watching from the high sky dome with her single glowing and unblinking silver eye. Under her sterling luminance a shape emerged from out of the dark and waited, shimmering upon the lip of the world, watching with incendiary eyes. The shape sat astride a great black steed with hoofs that were nailed with silver shoes, and those silver shoes caught the light of the moon and threw out sparks when it stamped the earth. The great black horse belched mist from its nostrils, its mane threaded with the jewelled tails of flying comets. Soundlessly the rider sung an aria to another, a summons that rang through the dark airs and over the black lawns. This other shape emerged from the nothing. It slithered and undulated as does a silk ribbon in the wind, invading the rose garden with a black stain and twisting around the trunk of the great oak. Bark shivered and winnowed free, falling in a rain of scales, and the shadow continued beyond the great tree, and it stalked up to the house. There it came in under the trellis and Selene blinked in her ring of purple cloud, exposing it as a great and blotchy palpitating dark mass. The colours drained from the roses in the garden, their buds falling limp in a tortured frenzy, red bled into sickly white, their leaves and thorny stems descending into diseased rust. From this delirium, the nothingness remade itself out of their ashes.

Onward the shadow rippled, moving by degrees, leisurely and deliberately, coming in closer to the residence while the demon on horseback watched on and guarded the periphery of the grounds. The shape slipped over the lace-work of tangled ivy that grew upon the side of the manor. In horror, the ivy clung to the masonry, its stems quivered and shook, desperately trying to twine tighter, a century of fanged interlacing knots unravelling like threads, coming undone in the shadows of the night. In the muted pewter beams the cordate leaves atrophied and changed to brown upon their stems, pale umbrels withered, but the climber refused to let loose its stranglehold over the mortars. The stones were dyed into shadow, yet the vine clung in ribbons of rust and high up under the eaves the doves and the owls fell from their roosts to the ground below, their wings spread over black and dead eyes. No crickets sang a chorus, no dog howled. In the surreal half-light, the shape devoured the atmosphere about it, gulping it hungrily down and rolling and swelling and it expanded, growing bigger as it crawled along, folding black velvet in upon itself and by turns to ripple and unfurl though it sustained no form of solidity. Soon its girth enveloped the moonlit façade of the house, spreading over the entire side of the building. The house was blotted out of the landscape. For a short moment, the shape throbbed and heaved obscenely, as if it were a beast breathing fuliginous airs, and perhaps its shape was suggestive of giant wings; perhaps it was not, yet the moon glimpsed this fleetingly in her great argent eye. It was composed of lurid purple dusks, deeper than the night and it shone as nothing dark can shine and it sang such a lovely euphony, the sinuous fragment of a melody played by Seraphim in the furthermost corners of the soul.

Emma was sleeping in her bed, the music filling her dreams and though she knew it not, her heart was pounding like a drum. Her subconscious wanted to sing a reply and in response she reached up a finger and touched the smooth white skin of her bosom. She sighed and groaned, anticipating something that was coming, coming to caress her and to touch. It was out there beyond her window; just outside the slim pane of reflecting glass that divided Emma from the night. Soon it would be in here, in the bedroom, and it would bring with it all the glorious promises of strange love. Conflict blossomed in Emma's sleeping mind, she heard the sweet seduction and wanted to be held, embraced, but she was still terrified. In her dream, she understood that this force, whatever it was, wanted her, to possess her, profanely and intimately. A part of Emma realised in terror that if she could wake up, right now, she could survive this love that was stealing through the night, but if she did not wake up then she was damned. She heard herself make a tiny pathetic whimper but in the dream's bondage, she was paralysed and could not respond. Her heart began pounding faster, to beat as a timpani beats, its tempo rising, rising, heralding the inevitable, her surrender, her final and ultimate conjoining with mad passion. Thief it was, the night, stealing into Emma's sleeping nightmare, pledging joys that could not be finite, declaring unspoken but still fervid vows, empty vows that she knew would only be broken. The darkness hovered just outside the glass, luminary in its unholy visitation, invincible in its beauty. It glittered with sinew and muscle and its bejewelled panoply of star-scattered wings dissolved. It altered and changed. Occluded light had begun to glow behind what might have been translucent eyelids. Those eyes were so blue, so large, as big as the moon, and huge and with narrow slits like a cat's eyes. They were beautiful yet frightening, and they did not blink.

The shape danced in the shadows like a veil before the wind, the nightmare made Elysian and Emma could hear the voluptuary thrumming of the blood surging through her veins, a torrent that sang its own strident song. She was repelled and yet fascinated, her mind invaded by a wonderful rush of glorious anticipation, the music flowing from the ether, the moon throwing silver fire on the floor, the shadows weaving. A gust of wind blew the windows abruptly open, scattering a maelstrom of dead ivy before it, the billowing folds of some dark and wondrous form tumbling in through the aperture and spilling over the falls of forever. The room became suddenly frigid and the darkness ran silver and agate tendrils over the moonlit floor, running in a pulsing conduit along the carpet. Emma's bedroom became a dark stage upon which strange horrors were enacted. Slowly the dark paced about the room, back and forth, prowling and growling! Soon enough its movements became more rapid, pacing hypnotically, and as it wove hither and thither it came up to the bed, and in her distress, Emma moaned, and threw her head to the side. Her eyes were squeezed tight so that she did not see but part of her mind wanted her vision to be filled with all that was glory while the other part wanted to flee. Emma gasped, yet she could not wake up, and she threw herself about in her sea of sheets as the night throbbed about her form. It coalesced above her thrashing body from a torrent of thick grey mist, incarnate, a writhing pillar of shadow and haze, pulsing with violet and indigo, ebbing and contorting with nacarat and ruby. Closer still it came, leaping back and forth, a whorl with dusky motes ablaze with sapphirine eyes, a beautifully hideous angel of death. The night crawled, leapt, and twisted with agile fidelity and then it abruptly disentangled from a spread of black into the image of a great cat made of darksome smoke. Soon it sprang up out of the maelstrom of whirling dark pleasures and although it was huge, as big as a jaguar, it landed lightly upon the bed, its claws extended and curved, gleaming like silver sickles in the moonlight. Emma gasped and the Lorelei sang sweeter and slid closer.

Emma forced her eyes open, forced herself to look. The phantom feline growled, lowly, threateningly. Fascinated, the dreaming Emma watched on helpless as the creature grew bigger, its claws dragging at the coverlet, and she struggled to cling to the fabric and to childishly hide beneath it, but the demon pulled it inexorably down and away from her breast. The chilled airs stroked her exposed skin and that skin pimpled with gooseflesh. This was the moment of truth, the moment when all else that should happen would count as nothing, when all would be as dust, for this was surely death who was upon her. Her desire for the handsome young man Ebhardt would be a desire that amounted to ashes; from this moment on she should never know the touch of his hand, the swell of his muscles, or the thrust of his sex. In the roiling spin of the dream Emma saw his sculptured face flicker and blink in the dark and disappear. She heard her dead friend Laura call to her, and Laura was crying from the rigid confines of a dank coffin which suddenly burst into fire. The golden-haired beauty sobbed that her life was finished and that her joys had never even been made real, but Laura's tears also availed nothing and as she wept she burned up and turned to ashes. Emma's father's ineffectual ghost twirled into view. He looked upon her face and then upon her body and his eyes devoured the bind of her pale skin with lascivious intent. Emma recoiled and shrank back from his gaze until he too vanished into a thread of mist that leaked into the void. Finally, there was Carmilla, whose lovely face rivalled that of Helen's. She was so gloriously beautiful, an image sculpted from the silver beams of stars and the bright shining gold of countless suns. How glorious she was, and serene, and yet that placid, temperate aura rippled in the passing of a second and changed. Now she was not calm, but angry and bestial. Her striking features were pulsing, her eyes as blue as the hottest and most distant suns. She snarled and hissed and then there was only the cat, and all and everything that composed the world of the dream flesh was engulfed in the mouth of the beast. The great feline opened fanged and dripping jaws and hunched down. Emma felt its body, long and warm and heavy moving against her, like a lover poised for the first stabbing thrust. The beast was purring, the vibrations pulsing through Emma's body. The flimsy fabric of her nightdress was all that separated the caress of its silken pelt upon her skin and it began a slow and deliberate drag and plunge. As the daemon hovered, so did it descend and its feral head came closer, closer to Emma's face and then receded again. It clawed deftly at the ribbons to her nightgown, undoing them and they flowed into the sheets in pale pink streams. Forward the cat thrust again and its lips quivered, ready to place the penultimate kiss upon the girl's mouth. The horror made Emma shrink back harder into her pillow, to turn her head away. She expected the kiss to happen immediately but it did not, instead the cat touched its cold and thin lips to her cheek and lapped at her ear lobe. The beast breathed a fervid stream of rancidity over her cheek and then, holding its claws at the hem of her nightdress, the slivered sickles popping from its paws hovered deliriously over the crown of her sex. The monster cat pulled the sheet lower, lower, and opened the front of Emma's satin gown. Arching its spectral body its tongue flashed between jagged fangs, repulsive and sticky, and that impossibly elongated organ wound down like a snake to her bosom.

There it wrapped wetly about the ivory globe of Emma's breast, licking at the nipple and dripping with mucilage. A thrill of shrieking horror and of tormented ecstasy sparked through every nerve, and involuntarily Emma's nipple hardened and her heart doubled its pace. Once again, the Devil's familiar moved upward, making in a slow circular motion with both tongue and claw, stroking and cupping and squeezing at her body. The tips of its awls made little indentations in her soft skin and Emma whimpered but was frozen in paralysis. The great cat gave a deep and throaty growl and all the while it traced a line of icy burning coals over the pretty young woman's exposed belly, and then it changed direction again and descended lower, lower. There was a protest wanting to break from Emma's lips, a cry for the torture to stop, yet there was a perverse promise in the song the fiend sang in her ear, a susurrate melody of the grave. Emma was caught up in the delirium, for the embrace was an exquisite rapture, an enchantment, a seduction in diseased poetry as much as it was an abomination. She groaned, vulnerable in its guile, and its eyes were huge and blue and their light radiated and seemed to pour into her head. Helplessly Emma twisted her face away and she clenched her eyes shut tightly but the light from the cat's eyes was so intense that it could not be blotted out. She groaned and whimpered and prayed that the darkness and the night and the dream would end. Yet the dark only went on and on and glowed, hot and violent, and was slashed through with exploding stars. The monster cat's hind legs pushed down, and pushed hard, and Emma knew that it was forcing her legs apart. Convulsing she wanted to scream, but the cat stifled her cry with a smothering paw, sealing off the shriek that was tearing its way up her throat.

That hot and colloid tongue was unravelling like a banner, and it left off tasting her white and splendid breasts and belly and began to flick rapidly lower into the cleft of her parted thighs. There was now anguish and fear in the dream beyond anything Emma had ever felt before, and yet the terror was comingled with the carnality of physical pleasure, and the entity purred and growled, inferring false promises of eternal and enduring love. The fevered stroke of the animal's tongue brought Emma to the edge of insanity. At the lip of madness was a place where soft fur and downy pubis converged to become enmeshed upon the throbbing fimbriated periphery of lust. The motion of the ghostly body grinding on top of her and the thick and dripping tongue lapping at her virginal sex brought Emma to the point of hysteria. With her heart upon the brink of bursting, the incubus retracted its hideous organ and leaving a trail of spittle it returned to Emma's breast with salivating lips, and it bit down. It was a fervid kiss, a disgusting, torturous raking as of thorns. There was a lancinate pain, a burning and stinging as if two needles had been driven deep into her flesh. Stiffening and shuddering Emma threw out her arms and the darkness fastened itself like a leech to her bosom. Abruptly the paw let go of her mouth and Emma found her voice, small and tiny, but it was there, and it was rising in the back of her throat, choked up from the well of night that was drowning her soul. Emma heard herself calling out 'No!' It was a thin and reedy and weakling objection expunged from her core and her flesh fought against the smoky and palpitating beast and flew through the mantle of her skin to burst from her lips in a terrified, waking scream. Outside in the night the Devil on his dark horse threw back his black head and laughed at the moon. The moon glimpsed a row of long pointed teeth before it vanished behind a cloud and its light went out like a snuffed candle, and then it saw no more.

The girl bolted upright in her bed, her nightdress pulled down, its pink silk ribbons in tangles, her sheets a tide of agitated foam. It was cold in the room, and dark, for the moon had dipped behind a cloud, and Emma could not see clearly. Upon her shriek, her first instinct was to throw herself to the side and fumble for the lamp that stood vigil upon the nightstand. Its flame leapt to life as she turned its little brass knob and the room and its furnishings bloomed with jaundiced light and dancing grey shadows. Emma was breathing so rapidly that she found herself gasping for air, almost sick in her terror, and she looked around wildly in search of the great animal that had come to her room and lay upon her as she slept. Perhaps it had crept under the bed, but Emma was too afraid to look. There was nowhere else for the beast to hide. The wardrobe was sealed tight shut and the door was closed. Only the window was open and the beast might have leapt through the aperture and into the night. Apart from the shadows, Emma saw that the room was empty, but that gave scant reassurance that she was safe. She heard the bedroom door abruptly click open, and startled she almost screamed again, clutching at the coverlet and pulling it up to protect her modesty. It was Mademoiselle Perrodon, and she came running quickly to the bed, the door staying wide upon the hall. She opened her arms to embrace and reassure the girl, but Emma shrunk back in terror.

'Emma, dear,' she asked softly. 'What is it? What is it?'

'I must have dreamed,' Emma choked, her eyes almost bursting from her pretty face.

Nervously she settled back upon her pillow, her skin cold, her body shaking. She held the bedding tightly with white-knuckled fervour.

'Dreamed what?' asked Mademoiselle, who began to soothe her charge by gently stroking her hair, and Emma began a broken sobbing.

'It's all right,' said Mademoiselle, and when the tears had ceased and were wiped away, Emma sat up and pointed to the end of her bed.

'A great cat,' she cried, still shivering and clutching the quilt to her bosom.

'It was a nightmare,' Mademoiselle reassured Emma.

'No!' Emma was convinced, and shook her head. 'My eyes were open. I swear I saw it!'

Mademoiselle stepped back and walked around to the other side of the bed, to the window that was open to the night. It was chilly in the room and Mademoiselle rubbed her bare arms. The moon burst silver from a bank of turbulent cloud and by its aureole beams the room seem to shift its shadowy perspectives into vaguely twisted angles, as if the darkness were breathing. The idea that the room was somehow alive made Mademoiselle expel a little gasp and she repressed another shudder and pulled the windows closed. Bad dreams were bad dreams, nothing more and this girl was now passing her silly fears on to others.

'It was grey,' insisted Emma, 'and big as a wolf. It had enormous eyes!'

'All the better to see you with!' Mademoiselle teased the girl, unaware that her remark sounded insensitive by making light of the girl's night terror, by implying through the fairy tale that Emma was nothing but a child.

'Don't laugh at me,' Emma responded, wounded and hurt. The two women faced each other in the pale lamplight. Mademoiselle felt slightly repentant and realised that she should not have been so hasty to joke. Yet she could not help but feel a twinge of resentment for the childish and vacuous girl. That resentment might have flickered visibly over her face and given her emotions away had she not concealed it with a forced smile. By the window, a dozen brightly coloured gerberas hung limp and stooped and wilted in their vase. Mademoiselle gave a little shiver as she looked at them. A soft wind poured in through the open glass and she reminded herself to tell Gretchin to take the lifeless flowers away in the morning and change them. Winter would not be far off and the nights were already growing quite cool, and Gretchin could begin tomorrow by sorting the winter bedding and making it ready. The Governess secured the window latch. The moon shone through an oval of purple cloud, bright and huge. It looked like a great big eye. By its light, the shadows in the room might take on any form that the nightmare gave them, and to the fevered dreamer anything might seem real.

'Oh, I'm sorry,' apologised Mademoiselle Perrodon. 'I was only joking to make you feel better.'

She moved away from the window and walked slowly back toward the bed. Emma held the covers tight so that her naked skin did not show. She was embarrassed enough and she did not wish to suffer any further humiliation.

'Emma, you must be rational,' the Governess proffered as she came closer, 'either you had a nightmare or you were awake and saw a cat.'

'A big cat,' Emma insisted. 'Grey!' She looked over the foot of her bed and then about the room and she almost screamed again, when she heard a cat meow. There was indeed a stripy grey cat sitting in the door frame, and Emma withdrew in horror and pushed back into her pillows. Mademoiselle sighed and moved toward the cat.

'It's all right,' she told Emma reassuringly. 'It's only Gustav.'

She stooped down and picked up the cat. Gustav protested mildly and wove his bushy tail back and forth in indignant irritation as Mademoiselle held him to her bosom and pressed herself against the door, closing it shut. She stroked the cat about the ears as she walked back to Emma's bedside. Gustav watched Emma with his big green eyes.

'You are very bad, Gustav,' Mademoiselle reprimanded the feline. 'Emma was terrified of you.' It was difficult not to sound condescending, but Emma did seem to be overreacting. As she stepped up to Emma's side the girl recoiled.

'Mademoiselle Perrodon,' protested Emma, 'it wasn't Gustav. It was a big cat, grey!'

'Shall I make Gustav big and grey for you?' asked Mademoiselle, holding the cat under her arm as she pushed back the lamp on the nightstand.

'There, you see.' Emma watched as the Governess placed the cat on the stand in front of the flame. The cat squirmed and by the lamp's waxy light, Gustav's shadow was thrown huge and dark-grey upon the far wall. As Gustav wriggled to be free, Mademoiselle held him tight. Emma did see, but the distorted shape was still only that, the shadow of the cat, and although she half smiled to her Governess in her heart, she was not convinced. Why, the lamp had been turned down all the time so it was not possible that she could have seen Gustav's shadow. Regardless, she did not want to dream like that again. Knocking on some unwanted corner of her mind there was the echo of a book she had read recently. From its illicit pages might be fuelled the basest of all dreams, and the nightmare she had just experienced most vividly reeked of those forbidden desires. Such things had been previously unknown to Emma and she shuddered with the realisation that her fantasies might have birthed such an incubus. Perhaps the cat in the dream had been Gustav after all, regardless of the awful and still lingering feeling of horror. It was better to accept that as truth and thus make the effects of the nightmare go away.

'You mustn't let your imagination get the better of you.'

'I'm sorry,' she told her Governess, thinking it best to agree, and it was pointless to argue because Mademoiselle thought her foolish anyway. She relaxed a little and put her head back upon the pillow.

'Will you sleep now?'

Gustav gave a plaintive meow as if asking to be released.

'I'll try.' Emma smiled and batted her eyelashes. Once again, she had been reduced to simpering because no one would listen.

'Good.'

The chill in the room had abated, and as Mademoiselle turned down the lamp, she looked across to the window. It was still dark outside but the morning would not be far away. The morning would bring with it the light and the dream would be all but forgotten.

'The trouble with this part of the world,' she observed reflectively, and to no one in particular, 'is that they have too many fairy tales.'

Dawn broke with a golden sequence over the Morton house, touching yellow light to the aperture of Emma's window, and throwing a warm and welcome greeting into her eyes. Emma had woken and she would have loved to be up and to go for a quick walk before breakfast, but she felt so tired and the dreams of the night had disturbed her so much that she had hardly slept. She could hear the distant lowing of the milking cows being taken to the higher pastures, there was a songbird twittering in a nearby tree, and she could also hear the faint chatter of servants and the disagreeable discourse of geese. Cook would have been up hours ago baking Brötchen and Kleingebäck, but the mere thought of having to eat that with a hardboiled egg, a slice of wurst and some cheese made Emma's stomach churn. In fact, she had absolutely no appetite at all and she felt somewhat weak, drained almost. She decided to stay in bed, just for a short while longer. She would engage with the household later, and Carmilla would come down from her room soon and they could walk in the garden. Her promise to learn more of her German today would become an empty promise indeed. There was a light tap on the door and Gretchin entered. She was carrying a vase of fresh flowers.

'I'll just be a moment, miss,' she spoke softly as she came in. 'Mademoiselle told me to change the flowers. Strange, miss, I only put fresh flowers in here yesterday. They haven't lasted at all.'

'No,' replied Emma, only just now wondering at the curiosity of the withered blooms. She added a little anecdote that her mother used to put a teaspoon of sugar in the water, 'to help feed the plants'. Gretchin smiled and thanked her for the suggestion, but sugar was an expensive commodity and if cook caught her using it in the flower water... When Gretchin had gone Emma stared blankly at the window for some moments, not moving under her covers, and then her fingertips traced upward to her left breast and touched the skin lightly. Her breast was tender, almost painful and it smarted. Emma pulled down the sheet and examined herself. There was a faint bluish tinge just above the nipple. Covering herself again she gave a deep sigh and closed her eyes. The sunlight streamed arulent through the glass and made the room warm and Emma felt drowsy and she slipped at length into a troubled slumber, and so she slept for most of the day.

Thus, did the night, over the next few moons, register a succession of dreams and nightmares; and every dream brought with it the great cat, and the cat lay upon her and when it did all the world's vibrant hues drained away to monochrome. Every night each vase of flowers that Gretchin would replace anew would turn sere on their stems, their leaves curling up like charred parchment, their petals dropping in a rain of tears as they bowed unto death. It was always the same. The nightmares endured even into Emma's waking hours, unfading, and there was no respite from them because even in the light of day they haunted her mind. She had begun to think about her mother again and why the woman had killed herself. Was it love that had driven her to death? Is that what love did to you? What a ghastly power then was love that it should make you want to finish your own existence in such a violent rage. Emma's face was white enough, like pastel, but it drained away to chalk at this horrible and invasive thought. It made her think then of her father. He said he had loved his wife, but had he really? 'He wasn't even there,' thought Emma, when the woman had taken her life. He was in Europe, setting up some deal with the East India trade. He was always gone for so long. Nonetheless, Emma had been so young and innocent in her head then and so foolish and docile, wringing her hands at her bosom during her mother's funeral service and declaring every night thereafter that God was unjust and that she wanted to die herself.

The young woman remembered a poem she had read one day, but she could not recall who had written it, and its refrain had been resonant with wretchedness.

'Beyond this window's iron grate, the pale light weeps in shades of slate

Wan pools of sunshine, shivering lie, in dull tones 'neath a sombre sky

All shrouded is the garb of morn as if Apollo in his scorn

Has sheathed the bright tips of his spears, instead to rain down woe and tears.

Each dim regret eternal falls, beyond these crumbling, mortared walls

And shades of grey and faded stars, expire between these rusted bars

And I wonder wretched, wonder long, why misery should sing my song.'

Every now and again, when not in the complete grip of melancholy, Emma would walk alone in places that her dear mother used to walk and fill a basket with wildflowers to put upon the woman's grave. Emma realised sadly that those garlands could never have the power to magically bring Mrs. Morton back from the dead, but the blooms looked pretty and faith said they represented the soul. Emma would linger by the grave for hours on other days, reading gloomy verse and falling into fitful sleep in the shade of the tomb. In this morbid state Emma lingered in a perpetual turmoil of living death. On one of his brief visits home Mr. Morton had found her curled up by barrow and cross and had carried her home. She remembered she had not felt safe at all in his arms, but rather disconnected. His concerns seemed almost perfunctory, even his calling the physician again, the one who prescribed the foul tasting distilled waters and boiled syrups that Emma was forced to drink. The awful concoctions only induced the need to vomit. Ultimately the Doctor's administrations amounted to nothing and upon his advice Mr. Morton had purchased a house in the Austrian province of Stiria and there he had moved his daughter so that she could no longer grieve over her mother's tomb. Morton had also engaged a Governess to chaperone and to teach and to be a companion to the young woman.

Mademoiselle Perrodon was only ten years Emma's senior. At twenty-nine years of age and a native of Narbonne, that French town first colonised in antiquity by the Roman Empire, she was quite attractive and remarkably astute and highly skilled in languages. She spoke French, German, Italian and English and had come from a reputable background. Mademoiselle had sanctioned her talents, and related that her family had once been of a reasonable class and wealthy, which explained her strength of knowledge, but now, in the wake of the Revolution, they had fallen on difficult times. As there was now not enough money in the family name to make Mademoiselle a good marriage she had taken up the profession of Governess. This need as a compromise to penury, for being married off was most unlikely. Yet this did not bother Mademoiselle Perrodon because she held the view that the right moment for such extremes had not arisen, and besides, becoming a Governess opened wonderful opportunities for travelling and broadening the mind.

Mademoiselle enjoyed her profession, and she enjoyed being in the company of young ladies and teaching them life's skills. Dealing with the education of young girls was so much more pleasant than having to deal with the coarse sexual attentions of men, young and old alike, for they were all the same. Men wanted to seduce you, to paw at your flesh and to make you heavy with child. Often, she thought, and without one moment of regret, that she was glad not to be married and to be tied down to the dull familiarity of domestic life. That would have meant having those men rake at you whenever they felt the urge and raising scruffy children and being utterly submissive to a man's every wish. She was not ready for such things, not yet, and probably never would be it the truth be told. Mademoiselle hoped and hoped such was never to be her destiny, and that she somehow enriched the lives of young girls. Perhaps fate had dealt her one blow that was softened by another. Yet this of course did not excuse her internalized conflict about Emma Morton, but that was something she was simply going to have to deal with in the path of her position, and like it or not there must be some sort of structure to Emma Morton's life.

Mr. Morton placed his knife and fork together and crossed them over his empty plate. Breakfast had been excellent; even Gustav had enjoyed some sausage. Renton stood in the background, waiting to pour coffee. Morton pushed his plate away to emphasise the fact that his Frühstück was done and that he needed no more food and then sipped at a cup of coffee. Morton himself had been practicing the German language and he prided himself on the fact. Soon he would be able to do as the natives did and life would be so much better. He looked up as Mademoiselle Perrodon came into the breakfast room and quickly swallowed his brew, rising from his seat as he did so, he pulled a chair out from the table so that Mademoiselle could sit.

'I have let Emma sleep on,' she informed him. 'She had a bad nightmare again.'

'It is beginning to worry me,' Morton confessed, for he had never understood the ways of the female and this new turn of events confounded him. 'She seems to have them every night now.'

He stood at Mademoiselle's back with his hands gently resting on her bare shoulders. Those hands were warm and they hovered upon her skin, and though she did not shake them off she suppressed an involuntary shudder. Morton looked down at her upturned face and smiled.

'She is so pale and listless,' he continued. 'I think she must be fretting over Laura.'

Mademoiselle was about to wholly agree when the conversation was abruptly cut short as their beautiful house guest came into the room. Carmilla was blindingly gorgeous, dressed in a lime green gown that made her white visage bloom like a white rose on a viridescent stem. The vivid red droplet of her ruby was even more pronounced as it dangled between her bosoms.

'Good morning,' Morton greeted.

'Good morning,' Carmilla greeted her host in return.

Mr. Morton caught himself staring at her breasts and he quickly diverted his attention by retracting his hands from Mademoiselle's shoulders and pulling a pocket watch from his paisley embroidered silk vest.

'I wish it were not necessary for me to go to Vienna today,' he directed his words to Mademoiselle. 'I don't know how long I will be away, but you know how to reach me. You'll write to me, let me know how she is, won't you?'

'Naturally, Mr. Morton,' Mademoiselle responded. The responsibility helped to inflate her position of power and that made her feel important. Morton tucked his watch away and stepped beyond Carmilla. A rush, like the heat from burning kindling disturbed the air that passed between them, as if the girl's aura were on fire. Carmilla did not look at Morton as he walked around her; instead she cast her eyes downward and demurely, coquettishly toyed with the cutlery set out on the table. Mr. Morton stopped in the frame of the French doors that led to the sitting room and he paused and turned and addressed Mademoiselle again.

'Why don't you call in the Doctor?' Morton suggested, 'Perhaps a tonic would do her good. I'm sure it's just nerves.'

Mademoiselle Perrodon agreed, flattered that Mr. Morton was now seeing her as capable enough to run the house in his absence. Doctor Vordenburg would have a long ride from the village, but he was the only physician for many kilometres and Mademoiselle would need dispatch Renton with the request. Renton wouldn't be too happy about that, but she despised him anyway. He was a letch and she knew it, and it gave her pride a boost to think that her station was above that of the lowly butler.

'Of course,' returned Mademoiselle, but Carmilla, who had been listening, opened her eyes wide, though no one saw. The smile on her carmine lips melted away and her flawless features were etched with the shadow of a troubled frown. The girl was motionless for a moment.

'Mr. Morton,' Carmilla spoke, gently but firmly, turning to face the gentleman at her back. 'I will take care of Emma as though she were my own sister.'

Reassured by the girl's earnestness, Morton smiled his approval. 'I'll just look in and see how she is before I go.'

Renton had moved to Mademoiselle's side and lifted the lid from a tray of poached eggs. The Governess raised her hand and waved him away and unable to conceal a sneer of contempt for the butler, leapt from her chair and began hurrying to catch Mr. Morton up.

'I'll come with you,' she said aloud, and Renton, with a vague shrug watched her go.

He was not so foolish that he did not know that the Governess resented him. That fool woman looked down at him, but she didn't have the upper hand over him yet. She had been simpering to Mr. Morton and what she hoped to achieve was obvious, the fact that she intended to make for a comfortable union with the master, even if she was frigid. Renton felt certain of this, and if it were the truth, then he was not going to cede to her the power to make life unpleasant for him. He knew she had no liking for him and neither did he have a liking for her, but perhaps the true lesson to be learned here was that she should perhaps not be so dismissive of the servants. After all, she too served, didn't she? She just didn't want to admit the fact. Mademoiselle did seem to cultivate an air of overly inflated importance, but that didn't wash with Renton, and if the simmering resentment continued there was bound to be conflict. In this part of the world the French were not so highly respected, why, it was not that far back in history that many had lost their heads, and Renton smirked as the Governess ran to catch Mr. Morton on the stairs. He turned and offered Carmilla the breakfast eggs but she too refused, gently smiling, her blue eyes meeting his own. Renton felt a slight quickening of his pulse.

'No, thank you,' said Carmilla. 'I'm not hungry.'

Mr. Morton's carriage kept a steady pace across the county, the road winding by field and forest. It had only just rained and parts of the road were muddy. He had been travelling for the best part of an hour when his carriage, pulled by two white mares, came to a halt in the way. A team of young men were repairing the broken rear axle of a leiterwagen. The load of hay and firewood had been unloaded from its laddered frame and piled up by the wayside. The wagon had slipped in a rut and pitched over, snapping its axel clean in half. Carl Ebhardt was supervising the repair and his men were in the middle of heaving the wagon up with a makeshift jack fashioned from a felled tree. Morton looked from his window and saw the young man. The Englishman was happy to confess that there was a most capable person in Ebhardt and he called General Spielsdorf's young manager over to his coach.

'Carl!'

'Good to see you, sir.'

Ebhardt reached through into Morton's carriage and shook the gentleman's hand.

'How is Emma?' he enquired.

'Not too well, just recently,' confessed Mr. Morton. He did not say that he had no idea what was wrong with his daughter and he did not want to suggest the fresh onset of melancholia. 'A bit upset,' he ventured, 'about Laura.'

Carl's handsome face sagged at the mention of his dead fiancée's name. No doubt that had been the trigger, and Emma was already a delicate child.

'I am just off on a business trip to Vienna,' Morton added, glancing to the road ahead, abruptly seeming a little impatient to be on his way. His expression began as one of worry and confusion but it quickly changed as if Morton's mind had been engaged by other more important matters. His eyes started to twinkle as he turned back to Carl. 'Do you think, you will be able to get over and see her, Carl, while I am away?' asked Morton of the young man. Something inside Ebhardt leapt into flame at the thought of Morton's pretty daughter. He had only just lost Laura so how could he be feeling an unspoken desire for Emma Morton? That was the strangest thing, and it was utterly disturbing given the chain of recent events, that he was attracted to the girl. He remembered how she had looked at him through her tears of grief when he had delivered the tragic news of Laura's demise. In his heart and in his head this surge of irrational desire made him feel uncomfortable. Despite the truth that there was no way to explain his feelings, something else coiled about his insides as well, a terrible fear that a whole new world of lies and deception would begin again should he even entertain travelling down that path. He had to admit that Emma Morton was pretty, even prettier than Laura, but one was dead and the other not well, and his own personal desires were in contradiction to what any involvement with these girls should dictate. General Spielsdorf had gone away and it had not been divulged when he might return. Ebhardt did not want to speculate how the General would react to any confession about his new romantic inclination for the English neighbour's daughter. This was as equally a nasty set of circumstances as had been the case previously, and Ebhardt found himself wallowing about in waters that he himself had muddied. He knew of no sure way to disentangle the net, so for the moment he had decided to simply shut the problem down. Having been left in charge of the General's estate Ebhardt knew that he could not possibly leave for any period, lengthy or short, other than to pay the Morton household a cursory visit. Why were things becoming complicated again?

'Yes,' he responded, hesitating and reluctant in his own heart. He took a quick glance over his shoulder at his labouring men. They heaved and groaned with the weight of the wagon and one slid the new axle shaft into place. 'Yes, of course, sir.' Ebhardt agreed and gave a supplicant smile, but knew somehow that he was making a mistake. Where were the lines of servitude and duty ever demarcated? Why did they so often unravel only to knot up again with the rope of guilt? 'If I can,' he added, and the guilt piled on heavier on his mind than any stone placed upon his flesh. Using work duty as an excuse was the only defence he could think up on the spur of the moment, but it wasn't enough to put Mr. Morton off.

'I know you're busy,' said Morton, 'but do try, sometime this week.'

'Yes, I will, sir.'

'I must get on,' Morton said hurriedly, tapping with the tip of his cane to signal the driver to be off. 'Carl,' he added as the carriage pulled forward, 'she has a young friend staying with her, so there you are, two pretty girls to visit!'

Two pretty girls! Morton sounded so blasé that the thought caused Ebhardt as much conflict as it did desire, and he simply stood quietly churning the words over in his head as he watched the coach disappear along the road. The voice of prophecy was sounding an alarm bell somewhere in the back of his mind and a worried look clouded his handsome face. Two pretty girls to visit sound as if history were repeating itself, and then there was the problem of Birgit's disappearance from the Bullheimer estate. He would soon have to join a search party when this cart was repaired, and yet he understood deep down in his gut that he must go to the Morton estate now. There was no way that he could not, for the lines of duty and desire had just become much further entangled than he might ever have wished. Something told him that he needed to go, for if he didn't…

As Emma deliberated the rapid frequency of her bad dreams, because there was no cessation to them, her mind sought to travel down paths that she had vowed not to go. She told herself that she must fight their intensity, but each night passed and became the next, and the dreams became more pronounced, growing with a hideous strength that left the young woman weak and debilitated. At night, she lived in terror of the cat and during the day she could barely call up enough strength to move. Although her room at night had become an oubliette for nightmares Emma found that she had little desire to come downstairs during the day, but Mademoiselle insisted. The young woman was certain that Mademoiselle thought she was malingering. The truth was simply that Emma just did not have the strength for company now, and she feared, and with genuine terror, that doom trod with her in every step, shaking her living foundations just as surely as an earthquake trembles the ground. After the seventh day, she had begun to feel so weak and so tired that her responses to Mademoiselle's insistence that she take some 'fresh air' became indifferent.

She would get up and dress and take a little breakfast and sit around listlessly all day. Mademoiselle Perrodon just did not seem to understand. Emma felt that her Governess lacked empathy, but it was almost useless trying to explain her state of body let alone her state of mind. In her growing fragility, it was only Carmilla who seemed to understand and support her. She came to see Emma every afternoon, just before the day was ending and every occasionally, Carmilla would take her by the hand and they would go for a short walk, but only as far as Emma could bear. It was as if Carmilla gave her strength, as if she imparted some of her own wondrous vitality unto Emma's body. This energy would momentarily revitalise Emma and it did feel good to be out in the afternoon air; sometimes they would sit under the arbour and Carmilla would read. Strange though, all the ivy had gone brown across the façade of the house and the roses in their gardens had either paled or died. Carmilla had remarked that it must have been because winter would soon be upon them, but it was most certainly an odd phenomenon that perplexed the gardener. On these occasional walks Emma would try to glean some of her new friend's history, but the beautiful stranger either evaded the questions completely by talking about other things or changed the focus of the conversation back to Emma. It was frustrating, and as the week closed and Emma's lassitude became more pronounced Carmilla seemed to become more devoted to her than ever.

Today, Emma sat in the latticed enclosure of the sun room, on a garden chair in the warm morning light. Beside her, at a wrought iron garden table, Mademoiselle stood flicking through a leather-bound history. Although the sun was gentle and washed her pale face with an assuaging tincture, Emma felt distant and disconnected from the world. She watched listlessly as Gustav chased a butterfly and disappeared into a thicket. Emma was no longer disturbed by the cat, for Gustav was of the temporal world, and the cat that visited her in her dreams was spectral. Mademoiselle had been looking over a text, perhaps with the idea that it might impart some educational or moral lesson unto Emma, but the pretty girl in her lassitude would never have been able to concentrate on a lecture today. The Governess for once felt a moment of empathy. She closed the book and pushed it to the side. Emma looked to Mademoiselle with a most imploring expression and her chalky features made her appear almost pathetic. Mademoiselle unfolded a rug and pulled it up over the girl's knees.

'Perhaps you will feel stronger soon?' said Mademoiselle encouragingly, taking the seat beside her charge.

'I hope I shall be recovered when my father gets back.'

That's all that mattered really, so long as everyone else was happy and not put out. The thought took Emma even further away from herself.

'Of course, you will.' Mademoiselle felt certain that Emma's lassitude was but a phase that the young woman was going through, a phase made worse by the recent death of her friend. 'It is nothing,' the older woman reassured. 'You mustn't worry about it.'

'I try not to,' Emma said lethargically, but she felt afraid deep down in her heart. She was consumed by her fears and they would not go away, 'but I keep having these awful dreams.'

Mademoiselle took an audible breath and straightened in her chair. She was about to dismiss Emma once again with a condescending shake of her head but Emma turned and faced her with wide and pained eyes.

'It happened again last night. I saw…'

'Now Emma, you mustn't allow yourself to be terrorised by your own imagination. I suppose it was the cat again?' Mademoiselle chastised gently but she was not exactly cold and unsympathetic, yet she spoke with frustration.

Emma cast her eyes to her feet. 'Yes.' Her reply was barely a whisper.

'Mademoiselle Perrodon, I must tell you, if I don't see these things, then I am going mad.'

Poor Emma was beyond the need for tears now. She looked up again and stared at her Governess with a visage painted in confusion. It was horrible and she wished the dreams would leave her be, but they came now, almost every night and they brought with them a mounting hysteria that was building to crescendo, that left a chilling taste of fear in her mouth.

'Now, Emma, you mustn't talk like that,' reprimanded the Governess. Of course, Mademoiselle would react just that way because, as Emma rationalised her situation, Mademoiselle Perrodon could not possibly understand. She was not the one having the dreams.

'I judge my own sanity sometimes.'

'Now you are just talking silly.'

Once again, the teacher hadn't the faintest grasp of Emma's fear in the night, for she wasn't the one visited by the shadow of the cat, a spectral beast that lay on her like a lover and kissed her and suffocated. If the nightmares continued for much longer Emma thought that she must certainly end up in a Bedlam.

'Am I? My mother was mad, you know that much.'

Mademoiselle Perrodon made a sharp little noise, one of surprise that Emma should speak to her so tersely.

'Well?' responded Emma, perceiving the older woman's umbrage. 'You tell me that she wasn't.'

'Oh, Emma, that is just your anxiety speaking, not your heart.'

'Then why did she… kill herself?' The words came out stalled and they conveyed as much hurt as they did confusion.

'Only she knows the answer to that and she is no longer with us.'

'No longer with us,' echoed Emma disparagingly. 'You make a life lived sound forgotten and the course of having lived it so perfunctory.

'Why, what do you mean?' Mademoiselle was somewhat offended.

'It's like we only exist with the purpose of dying. We don't think about such things as death until they happen in our lives, and then we are obliged to say all the right things, are we not, to console others in their loss?'

'Is that it then? Do you think I do not care, that I merely console and don't understand because I have never suffered loss? Do you not think that General Spielsdorf is another who is suffering?'

'Yes, of course, I know he suffers. Nonetheless Laura too is dead and I am in fear for my own sanity because there are too many deaths in my life.'

'Please do not talk like that, Emma. You sound as if no one cares.'

'Did father understand that mother was ill? She was ill; she had to be, to do such a thing to herself. Surely there must have been signs.'

'Oh, Emma, your father is a good man and he loves you. Please don't blame him.'

'Mademoiselle Perrodon I'm not assigning blame. Perhaps he loved mother dearly, but I fear that blood will have blood. Is that why I dream these dreadful dreams, why I am plagued by demons of the mind? What will happen to me?'

Mademoiselle of course did not have the answer to the questions, and she did not want to know the answers. The girl was haunted by shock, by mania melancholia brought on by grief, and that only encouraged her in her negative memories, and those memories manifested as dreams that seemed real in their horrific battery of the unconscious mind. Mademoiselle found herself speculating upon the gravity of the young woman's mentality. Was Emma really going down the way of madness? It seemed to be the truth. To think that was one thing, but to express such thoughts took you down a road that led to trouble. She didn't dare say a word to her employer about the opinions she held regarding his daughter's mental impairment for fear of dismissal, and so she had decided that Emma needed to be encouraged to restore herself from the ignorance and absurdity of believing that dreams caused your illness. To counter, she replied: 'It was probably only poor little Gustav that you saw again,' deflecting the conversation back to the temporal and away from Emma's heightened morbidity.

Emma closed her eyes in defeat. She knew it was useless trying to make Mademoiselle understand. She gave the ghost of a smile.

'Yes, it is just my imagination.'

Mademoiselle Perrodon reached over and took Emma's hand, but there was not reassurance in the touch, just condescension. 'Of course, it is. Now you sit still and get some rest.'

Emma looked at her but her expression was blank.

'It is just that your mind is overactive, that's all.'

Mademoiselle's words fell away for they were empty words and ultimately, they didn't matter. As Mademoiselle faded to the back of Emma's mind the girl tried to imagine that she would be safe, but could only focus on the awful truth that soon the darkness would come and there would be nowhere to hide. The dark would bring with it the nightmare and from the depths of the fever dream would stalk the cat, and worse, much worse, the cat would drag her into hell as it sated its hunger perpetual at the virginal font of her living blood. In terror Emma was poised upon the threshold of the night.

Later, in the afternoon, after Carmilla had come from her room, they had gone to the garden for a constitutional. At the edge of the park Carmilla and Emma had been sitting together on a marble bench in an embrasure, when a most peculiar incident occurred. Emma had been settled quietly in the waning warmth of the sun, listening to the hum of insects and the soft twitter of finches and pipets, the water splashing in the ornamental fountain, a little breeze sighing. With a drowsy eye Emma had been watching Carmilla. Enigmatic was her new friend, so strange, often distracted, always mysterious about her family. The beautiful girl was sitting silently next to her, and she was staring fixedly into some unknowable place, utterly consumed by an unspoken internal conflict. Her face, her lovely features, every now and again twitched and her eyes narrowed, and Emma would hear little gasps escaping from the stranger's lips. Whatever it was that consumed Carmilla's thoughts Emma would have liked to know, but she dared not ask. Something had aroused her friend, and she was fighting to contain whatever it was. Nonetheless, this made Emma anxious.

'You came down late again,' said Emma, and Carmilla turned her head, like an owl turns its head, with wide staring eyes that did not blink, and she looked upon her pretty companion.

'You know that I rarely wake with the sunrise,' intoned Carmilla dismissively. 'Yet no matter the amount of sleep I get, I always seem listless and tired. It is as if I am becoming ill and do not know the fact except by degrees. I do not wish to eat, just to sleep, and when I do...' Carmilla did not finish her sentence.

'Oh,' Emma intoned, her mind disquieted, realising the mirror of her own symptoms now here reflected in the those of her friend, with subtle variance, of course, but disturbingly similar.

Carmilla shook her head slightly and sighed. 'Nonetheless, I could stay in bed no longer. '

'Perhaps you need a sleeping potion. I am sure Doctor Vogelreiter would mix you something to help.'

'I do not need the Doctor's embrocations,' declared Carmilla as she reached over and took Emma's slim hand in hers.

'Of course,' replied Emma, and then, after a few silent moments had passed, she gave a soft smile and withdrew her hand. 'There is a ruined church not far from here,' said Emma, 'with a bell tower and a secret folly. It is most romantic. Do you think you would like to stroll there and back?'

'I am so tired,' complained Carmilla, the pale sunlight glinting from the ruby about her throat. She passed a hand over her eyes and they fell into shadow. 'Barely can I find the strength to walk back to the house let alone walk to a ruin.'

'I know, and I understand. It is just that I sometimes go there when I ride,' Emma related, her voice sweetly modulated. 'It is peaceful and serene. There is a little graveyard there too. I thought it might be a nice outing before we retire to dinner.'

As she spoke a butterfly, a Monarch, like a fiery orange jewel, skimmed by her wan cheek. It fluttered for a moment, hanging in the air, and then it skimmed away, seeking a milkweed.

Carmilla sighed. 'But it is just as serene and peaceful here, in the garden, don't you think?'

A suffused golden haze had drifted over the poplars and the stone walls, gilding the browning ivy.

'Perhaps nature has purposely set the stage and is now waiting for the actors to enter.'

'Why, Carmilla, how Shakespearian of you!'

Carmilla half-laughed. 'Who knows,' she replied, her strange mien returning. 'Is the play a farce or a tragedy?'

Emma looked upon the girl in bewilderment. 'You say the most confounding things.' Life was sometimes humorous, yes, but lately all it seemed to bring was tragedy.

'In this spot here, with you, there is peace. No need to go to some old ruin or to linger by the mouldy tombs of the departed.'

'How sweet you are, Carmilla,' insisted Emma. 'That I should inspire peace in your heart despite the dead.'

'Perhaps nothing is ever completely dead,' Carmilla responded, and her voice had taken on a most profound and sorrowful tone. Whatever did she imply? Emma could not fathom her friend. Did Carmilla speak of memories? If she did, then memories of the departed lingered even if they themselves were not here to speak and to sing and to weep and to laugh.

'Why, there you go again. Whatever do you mean?'

With a half-suppressed grimace, Carmilla turned aside, her bosom heaving, her face gone pale. With no further reply forthcoming, Emma sighed and bowed her head and languidly rested her cheek upon Carmilla's shoulder. Exhaustion settled into her body, and perhaps it was a blessing after all that they had not walked to the ruined church. A translucent cloud passed over the sun and like a veil it rippled over the topiary and the stone. It cast a shade upon her gaunt face. From up the garden path they heard the tinkling percussion of a little bell. The two young women both glanced up at once to see a strangely attired traveller limping along the way. He wore stockings and boot-hose, and there were patches in his shirt and dust on his breeches. On the man's head was a wide black hat, about his throat a scarf, and he leaned on a walking cane as he shambled, a stick from which depended ties and pouches and metal cymbals and charms, even a rabbit's paw. That peddler filled Emma with a sudden curiosity. A large black dog accompanied the man, walking at his side on a tether. It was not until the man shambled close with uneven step, dexterous despite a misshaped body, that the dog began to growl and snarl. The man apologised and tied the cur to a sapling. As he turned to do this, Emma saw that his back was deformed by a gross hump. Carmilla stiffened, her own body going as hard as a plank, and Emma moved away, sensing the other's tension. For some reason Emma did not feel at all threatened by the stranger, despite his deformity and ugly visage. One of his eyes was blind and one corner of his mouth drooped. The man greeted the women and smiled, bowing as he did so, and Emma smiled in return, not repulsed by his loathsome appearance, for when he spoke his voice was moderate and rang with a tone of intellect and gentleness. The hunchback came closer.

'Good day to you both,' he said, motioning to the dog that still growled and pawed beneath the tree. 'Generally, he likes most people. I do not know what has agitated him so.' The man removed his hat and bowed slightly.

Carmilla stood up, but her retreat staved by the stone bench and the granite wall into which it was set. For some reason she felt trapped, and her movements were abrupt and cat-like, and the hunchback loomed closer and his eyes mapped her body.

'What would you have?' His question was direct but posed to both women. 'A love potion?'

Carmilla sneered in revulsion. There was a sly suggestion in the beggar's words that offended the beautiful girl. What was this aging mendicant suggesting, that they were loveless? In older times, this offender would have been whipped for this transgression, but here he stood, propping his hat upon the tip of his staff, his fingers already untying a little leather pouch from his tinkling pastoral staff.

'A drug, an herbal?' continued the man, his fingers dancing nimbly with the leather knot. 'A philtre... a charm against those who bear you malice? Something to ward off the evil eye?' He turned to Emma, who looked upon him in wonderment.

'There was no evil here until you arrived!' Carmilla's words were stern and brutal. She would bear no truck with peasants, with filthy, dirty scum. Indeed, the man seemed to read her thoughts, for his eyes glittered and he laughed lowly. He had suffered the tyranny of the nobility many times, it mattered little, but here, in this young woman he sensed something altogether different. There was some force manifest here, something dark, a power born of a ruder and more brutal age. Something older than the gloriously beguiling flesh of sterling youth that stood before him.

'Oh, Carmilla,' Emma protested, 'I don't think he means us harm.'

Admonished, Carmilla turned aside. She wanted to be quit of him, and she trembled in rage, her demeanour losing its calm, betraying her with every word spoken. Her lips curled up in a snarl and her hair bristled. Her teeth flashed in the dappled light.

'I know of the dwelling places of spiritual entities,' he said with solemn gravity, 'and I have charms to prevent their visitations.' Upon this sentence, he jangled the bells on his walking cane. 'I see a most unusual thing, a thing shrouded in darkness,' the hunchback continued, and Emma gasped. He glanced at the maiden, and then pointed a finger at her companion. 'Lucky are you to have known my acquaintance, for with me I have charms, amulets and talismans against demons.' He passed the little leather pouch to Emma, and it smelled of foreign herbs and musky. 'I have another to ward off the spirits of the dead...'

'Go away, fool!' Carmilla demanded. 'Emma, you do not need to listen to...'

'Take it,' the peddler insisted of Emma. 'I want no payment. It will keep you safe at night... when you sleep, when you dream.'

Emma's fingers curled about the tiny purse, and she shuddered that he should think to know that she dreamed. The one-eyed hunchback came closer to Carmilla.

'You too, young lady, should not be without protection.' The man began to rummage in the pocket of his breeches and brought forth a little file. 'I see that your tooth is sharp. You must have pain. I can assist...'

'Go away!' shouted Carmilla, and her face screwed up into an angry contortion so that the beauty that usually commanded her persona all but fled.

'In some houses,' said the hunchback, 'death is a tenant.' Upon these mysterious words, he cast his eye over Emma, and Emma's expression was puzzlement and terror. 'Truly, take heed,' he continued, not to be dissuaded. 'A young girl was found dead hereabouts, only just the other day. They said her skin was like wax... that she had been drained of blood.'

'Quiet! You old imbecile!'

'I have journeyed for forty years in these parts and I have seen many things. Strange and wonderful things,' the old peddler went on, ignoring the angry young woman. 'In Moravia, in the old town of Těšín Silesia, I saw things that do not abide the finality of the grave. If I have not dreamed it, perhaps your face is familiar to me... What are years but a blink in eternity's eyelids to such things?'

Upon the hunchback's cogitation, Carmilla groaned aloud, and the hound yelped and strained against its bonds.

'How is it possible that you could know me!' Carmilla cried indignantly. 'We do not have to listen to your mischief.' She snatched the talisman from Emma's fingers and threw it underfoot, stepping upon the herbs. 'Your disgusting phylactery stains an innocent's fingers! Be gone!' she declared vehemently. 'My father would have you flogged for such insolence!

'No, my lady, I am an honorable man. I meant no offence regarding your tooth. Concerned was I for your discomfort. Let me a closer look.'

'Do not touch me!' Carmilla flew about and raised her hand as if to strike the infidel, and poor Emma shook with fear and almost burst into tears. 'Come,' the beautiful girl commanded of Emma Morton, 'let us leave this cretin to his depraved and dishonorable raving. See, even his hound cannot bear his loathsome company!'

In provoked rancor, Carmilla gripped Emma's hand and almost dragged the girl from the garden, cursing the profane hunchback with every step trod on the path all the way back to the house. The hunchback watched the two young women as they fled. As a little wind sighed through the hedges and jingled the little tin bells on his staff, he put away his file, untied his dog, replaced his hat upon his head and sat for a short while on the marble bench where Carmilla had been seated. There he paused with a strange weight descending upon his mind. Something nasty clung to the aura of this place, some spiritual power that had walked this way before, something rank and heretical. Something evil.

Mademoiselle Perrodon had earlier gone down to the library and now as she returned upstairs she hesitated and listened to the indistinct chatter and the laughter filtering through Emma's door. It was beginning to get cooler now and she adjusted the shawl she had draped across her bare shoulders. As she listened outside of Emma's room she gave a little smile. It was a relief to hear Emma chatting and laughing. Emma had been so sombre and depressed of late, so perhaps she would concede that the girls talk for just a short while longer; they were after all young women and if Emma was laughing, then it meant she might be feeling a little better. She left Emma's door and went to her own room to read, the chatter fading as she walked down the corridor.

'Carmilla, that peculiar old hunchback frightened me somewhat. Whatever did you make of his ravings?' Emma ran a finger over the bone handle of her hairbrush but did not pick it up. Instead, as she sat at her dresser, she cast a dreamy eye into her looking glass. The strange old peddler had implied that he knew Carmilla- now how was that possible? The beautiful visitor replied with a suppressed sigh of disgust but said not a word. In the mirror, she saw Carmilla's reflection, seated close to the dresser with her back to the window, watching Emma with a languid gaze. Burning within that reflection, she saw the glow of the ruby that hung about Carmilla's splendid throat. With a little gasp, as if she now realised something that she had not thought before, she turned away from her dresser and extended a white arm toward her companion.

'That is such a lovely jewel, Carmilla. I have marvelled at it since the day we met. It must be the biggest ruby I have ever seen. It is a ruby, isn't it?'

'Yes,' Carmilla replied, her voice husky, her expression relaxed and almost sleepy.

'It's exquisite!' Emma stretched forward and reached over and touched the gem with hesitant fingers, cautious as if the rubiform stone were hot and burning with fire, her fingertip brushing against Carmilla's pearly skin. The beautiful girl stirred and gave a little shudder, raising her hand and pulling away her cascade of auburn hair. The motion revealed her bosom, the pink nipple partly exposed and peeking over the hem of her nightdress. Carmilla smiled thinly.

'It is magical, you know.' Here she paused.

'A talisman?' Emma withdrew her hand.

'Far more than that,' returned Carmilla, and Emma's eyes glinted in the red refracted light of the ruby. 'It once belonged to a beautiful Egyptian queen, over 3,000 years ago.'

'Really!' exclaimed Emma, her eyes like a doe's, her lips forming a beaming curve. '3,000 years… why, I can hardly image a life lived so long ago!'

'It was the Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt's Middle Kingdom,' continued Carmilla, her voice taking on a romantic but grave tone, 'in a palace of untold riches built on the west bank of the river Nile that she lived. Her name was Tera.' The beautiful stranger lifted the ruby from the valley of her bosom, sparkling on its filigree chain. 'If you look closely you can see the seven stars shining within.'

'Seven stars?' asked Emma, not comprehending what her friend inferred, that the gem might possibly be of cosmic origin and that it's light was the captured light of a stellar configuration beyond space and time. Emma stared and there within the stone she did indeed behold the octuplet constellation, glimpsing its luminance glimmering over three, vast, and almost forgotten millennium.

'Queen Tera was both loved and hated,' continued Carmilla, 'for she was beautiful and cruel in equal portions, and her legend tells us that her temple priests were angered with her arrogance and were instrumental in her death.'

'How so?' asked Emma, fascinated by Carmilla's tale.

'Expeditions into Egypt have discovered stones and papyrus inscribed with ancient writing,' Carmilla responded, leaning over and nudging in close so that her bosom pressed against her companion. 'One such stone was unearthed from the ancient sands some thirty years ago, by French soldiers in Egypt, in the Delta of Rosetta. They could not read the script carved into the granite for almost twenty years, but they understood its importance. It was another clever Frenchman, a Monsieur Champollion, who broke its mysterious code. What a clever man was he! By his translation such writings were made decipherable, and thus from the inscriptions on her sarcophagi we might know Queen Tera's story. Her tale tells of the Ancients, of temple priests who were versed in the art of magic. By such magic they bound Tera, not only in the linen and natron that preserved her mummified flesh after they had plotted and ensured her death, but in the spirit too. Yet like all foolish men they reckoned not that even from beyond the grave, Queen Tera would use their own corrupted magic against them.'

'How fascinating!' declared Emma, 'and frightening too!'

'Be still, and listen' reprimanded Carmilla. 'Into the womb of the earth they thrust the queen, sealing her away from the living, to be unremembered. They even cut her name from her coffin so that she would disappear in the afterlife as well, and so she slept in silence for all these thousands of years. Then, one night when the silver disc of the moon was in eclipse, and the seven stars were glowing at their brightest, a tremor shook the earth to its core.'

Emma shuddered and was entranced. She had never heard such a wondrous adventure before and she hung on to Carmilla's words in a suspense that stilled her breath.

'Oh!' was all that the young girl could manage to say, but her friend continued her tale.

'The tremor caused a rift not only in the fragile skin of the planet, but also in the fabric of time, and created a bridge between this world and her world, a slim pass through which her spirit could slip so that she might walk again among living beings.'

'To walk again after death! Was she a ghost? It's frightening to think of a ghost coming back again!' Emma quivered nervously.

'Perhaps.'

'I don't understand why she would wish to return to the land of the living, having been treated so badly. Why, she would be changed. She could never be how she was!''

There was, perhaps, a horrible profundity in Emma's words that made Carmilla think about how she could never be how she had been. Alive!

'Those priests, those men, they did not realise the power of the ruby,' the beautiful girl said after a short pause. 'The ruby, her magic stone that they had buried with her was loosened from her grasp when the earth had quaked. It was stolen from her burial chamber, bled to the skin of the earth like a drop of blood from the mummy's tomb. The thief must have sold it, not truly knowing its priceless value, and then over time it passed from hand to hand, from country to country, and always through the clutches of foolish men.'

'Who was the foolish man who last possessed the stone, Carmilla?'

'The man's name is not known, but as you see,' and she held the ruby in the palm of her slim hand, 'that man procured the gem from a beggar in a foreign market, and it is said that he met with a horrible death. Torn limb from limb by a pack of wild dogs.'

Emma gasped in horror, imagining the viciousness of the man's death, of the ferocity and the violence of the dismemberment. With a shudder, she recalled the snarling hound that had accompanied the hunchback in the park.

'So now it adorns my neck, for it belongs to no man now nor will it ever, for no man can ever understand, nor wield its power, though I do. Any man who thinks to possess it must always die.'

'Die!' Emma gave another involuntary shudder. 'Oh, you are terrifying me, Carmilla.'

'It is written that Tera was divine in her creation and vested of a wondrous guile. Legend says that once she herself had crossed into the realm of the deceased she could compel even great Set, the Lord of the Dead to abide by her rule.'

'Oh, this is all thrilling and yet so absolutely scary,' said Emma, her imagination taking a flight of fancy even though she could hardly picture the distant landscape of ancient Egypt. On the wall, hung in the stairwell, there was an etching of the great pyramid of Cheops. Her father had it commissioned after a successful business deal importing sweet dates from Egypt. He loved to show the etchings off to visitors and tell them tales of his travels, even though he had never been to Egypt. Still, the pyramid was merely a triangular shape drawn on stiff paper to Emma, whose knowledge of the bygone past was limited. She made no connection with shape and tomb and a bridge linking earth to stars, and all such things belonged in another land, another world, and to fantasy. There were other pictures too, hanging in a descending line in the stairwell; renderings of exotic and unknowable lands, one of the Parthenon in Greece and another of the Coliseum in Rome, both were crumbling ruins. To Emma they were simply just that, pictures of places from antiquity, places that she had never been and probably would never go. Emma had never thought or been taught to contemplate the history that they might evoke. History was dull when Mademoiselle forced it upon her, but it seemed different, exciting, and romantic when it spilled from Carmilla's lips, even if the girl coloured it with a tingling and terrible romance. Emma listened in wonder as Carmilla continued to divulge the past. It was as if her tantalising evocation of the long ago were something that she had somehow and impossibly lived.

'Tera's ruby and her magic are now mine,' Carmilla smiled, 'and its power, too!' Her big blue eyes grew wider and her stare became intent as if she were on the brink of imparting some gloriously wonderful but secret revelation.

'Power?' replied Emma. 'Power over what?'

'Over death, perhaps,' answered her companion, her voice quite suddenly becoming excited.

She let the chain go and the stone fell heavily against her breast, vibrating to the beat of her heart.

'Tera's power was strong, as is all female power, yet weak and foolish men sought to destroy it, to destroy her.'

'Destroy her? The priests of the temple killed her and buried her, but what did they truly gain?' asked Emma, not at all understanding. For a moment Carmilla was silent and the excitement left her face, trailed out of her voice and then she shrugged.

'Yes indeed,' Carmilla spoke in an abruptly deflated tone as she turned to look at her reflection in the looking glass. On some deep and subliminal level, she knew that her struggle in the world was as useless as was Tera's, and that Emma, innocent as she was could hardly understand that she and all women lived at the behest of men. 'Why should we seek for intervention in our lives and why should we acknowledge our own desires? For what do we gain in our struggle?'

'Perhaps,' Emma replied, vaguely insightful in her observation of life's truth, 'if we have everything we require, surely the one thing we lack is the liberty of our hearts.'

'Yes,' said Carmilla, sighing. She had churned the truth of this over in her head many times and had concluded that if you wanted the power to merely live your life how you wished it to be, then you must be prepared to be punished for that desire. Emma was but a young girl, and she knew not the wide world in which men commanded and ruled and locked young women up like pretty things in hidden rooms. She was ignorant, or at least played at being ignorant, pretending that she knew nothing of virgins held captive in castle towers, in dungeons, in tombs. Those women had no voices and their names were erased, and no one seemed to care. They had tried to erase Tera from the world too, but had they truly succeeded?

'So, Tera was punished for being beautiful and strong, or... outspoken?' Emma ventured but was unsure that she was giving the correct response.

The idea of female power and female enclosure running counter to each other suggested to Emma that the two notions must fail to exist comfortably within the same space. It was not something she could easily grasp even though it formed the structure of her own lonely life. If Tera's story were an analogy that linked her lonely and trapped existence to the road which could lead her to gain her own voice and power, she was unable to understand it at all, for it was riddled with violence. In the story Tera had been killed for wanting just such a thing, and men did not seem to hesitate when they wanted to punish. Emma was torn inside and confused. How many ways could one die? In Tera's case, the death was not simply physical. A creeping suggestion began to seep into her mind, and it concerned her mother, and Emma did not like the thought. If Carmilla was suggesting that there was strength in female power and that it existed regardless and despite the agency or the interference of foolish men, then that had not helped Tera and it most certainly had not helped Emma's mother. Female power, if it existed at all, remained a mystery to Emma because she felt caught half-way between these worlds of power and domination and submission. Part of her was unwilling to cede, to wrest her own control from a dead past and to come alive, but another part wanted to be dominated. If doing so meant never seeing or touching or loving a handsome young man like Carl Ebhardt, then perhaps Emma did not want to find the supremacy of her own voice. What did this beautiful stranger have to gain if indeed Carmilla posited herself as the agency by which such freedom of thought was possible? What kind of love did this girl seek?

'She was outspoken,' said Carmilla, serious in her expression, nodding as she talked.

'Yet that is just a story,' Emma countered with a vapid half-smile after pondering the negative aspects of speaking up for yourself. If you were candid you might also be perceived as being disrespectful, and the moral of the story seemed to be that if you were outspoken you risked being seriously punished. In her experience, it did not pay for girls to be too smart.

'Not just a story,' re-joined Carmilla, 'but the truth.'

'How can you know this? You talk as if you had been there,' said Emma, becoming perplexed at how rapidly Carmilla had become serious. 'That is surely not possible!'

'Tera lived and her powers were real,' Carmilla insisted, pulling away from her friend with a dismissive and irritated wave of her slim ivory hand. She stood up and opened the window. A little breeze rippled in through the lace and made wisps of her auburn crown. As she stared out into the night, her brow creased into a strange frown.

'I did not mean anything, Carmilla,' Emma protested repenting her words. She had concluded that her guest was so terribly strange and was so easily given over to abrupt distemper. Emma never knew one mood before the other because they changed so rapidly. Carmilla had now sealed up her lips and was intent on the darkling world without. 'Tell me more of your story, please!'

Slowly Carmilla turned back from the window and leaned forward, whispering in Emma's ear as she did so.

'The temple priests cut off her right hand, for on that hand Tera had seven fingers!' Emma's face blanched with a little shock and looked down at her own hand, spreading her fingers wide and gasping as she did so. Carmilla laughed aloud and intimated her joke, and Emma felt foolish and laughed too.

'If you look to the north,' said Carmilla when the last tinkling laugh had tripped from her lips, 'you can see, high up there in the firmament, a ruby pinned in the dark.' She pointed out of the window and up into the darkling sky. 'It is a blood red planet named by the Romans after the God of War, Mars.' She intimated with her eyes that Emma look up into the night empyrean. Emma followed Carmilla's vision and looked to the line of her pointing finger, but she could not distinguish one star from another in the host of the heavens, let alone one that glowed red. They all looked the same to her eye, all of them glittering crystalline jewels that hung in the celestial panoply of the night.

'That light comes to us from the past,' whispered Carmilla. 'It streams through the velvet ether from some long forgotten and distant point in time. It travels for so long, and like a rainbow splitting, it filters through the turbulent airs of the earth, and because of this we cannot see that the night sky is really painted in a kaleidoscope of vivid colours.'

'What do you mean, Carmilla?' Emma asked bewildered. 'Colours! You are so romantic that you imagine such things! The stars are all the same, like diamonds. Just look at them.' They both stared at the heavens, but only a few stars hung in the night sky, up beyond the airy realms and beyond the moon. All were silver. Carmilla pulled up the corner of her lovely lips and made a little scoffing noise. 'Alas, so it would seem,' she told Emma, affirming in her head how blinded her companion really was, 'but tonight Mars is alight with violence and rage, and that rage overshadows what the ancient Romans called 'Septentriones', the constellation of the seven stars.'

Here Carmilla drew herself up as if some unseen and high power were filling her lovely frame, and she half closed her eyes, caught up in an eidolon that remembered some ancient and bygone experience. Perhaps she was drawing the stars' power unto herself.

'Those stars are like pointers,' she continued, 'like Tera's seven fingers, directing us to an anonymous immortality.'

'I do not follow you. What do you mean?'

'She was forgotten all these thousand years,' reiterated the beautiful sylph.

'We remember her tonight, don't we?' responded Emma. The idea that women, that female power itself should be recognised was obviously important to her beautiful friend, but it eluded Emma Morton completely and in her misinterpretation, she understood neither Carmilla nor Queen Tera. Carmilla opened her eyes and peered at the young maiden's face.

'How could she be forgotten if you have spoken her name?' Emma asked, and Carmilla replied softly, 'No, I have not forgotten. Will you remember my name after I have gone?'

'For always,' replied Emma, and she could not help but think Carmilla almost sad. 'Is your ruby 'Septentriones', the jewel of seven stars?'

'Maybe it is,' Carmilla sighed, and her gaze was still fixed on the night sky, 'that one, the red one!' The fire in the stone leapt and flashed scintillates in Emma's eyes.

'Funny, isn't it?' said Emma, her voice gone a little quiet, distant, almost disconnected.

'What is that?' asked Carmilla.

'That I can say 'Septentriones' but I cannot learn the most basic German!'

'Sometimes we resent learning useless things,' responded Carmilla, her expression enigmatic, her words vague.

'Although I read in my own native English well I struggle just to learn the most basic German! I'm afraid that without those useless lessons,' Emma was now confessing something she secretly dreaded, 'I won't be able to find a proper position in life. That is the misery of it all, that I must learn things like needlepoint and music and German, and I am no good at any of them. They will want me to marry somebody well-to-do. Why, I won't be free to choose the man I love.' Emma paused in her reflection.

'They say,' offered Carmilla drily, 'that young girls learn such silly things like playing the piano so that their mothers know where they are.'

Emma raised her big doe eyes and the shadow of irony crossed her pretty face. 'I wish I had my mother to know where I was,' she said quietly, and then with a shrug she added, 'and a young man to be with. At least that would be something real in my life. Both my father and Mademoiselle expect that I should be educated like a young lady, that I know how to catch a decent husband, and one rich enough to ultimately relieve them of their burden. I cannot say that without feeling the most awful guilt, but I believe nevertheless that it is true. Neither of them understand me, for they think I'm either not trying because I'm being difficult or that I'm difficult because I'm silly. '

'You should not worry about that just yet. The need to catch a husband is a long way away. If there is ever really a need for such a foolish notion, I might add!'

'Still, we look at the stars,' echoed Emma, sighing in defeat, 'and they too are a long way away.' Love for her might just as well be as distant a notion as was any of the stars in the wheeling galaxy that spun in endless revolution through the blackness of eternity, as distant as those seven stars from Carmilla's story. Emma confused even herself because she wanted one thing in contradiction of her own agency and wanted the other without the need to cede to the whims of the world. All this only succeeded in reducing Emma to a mere spectator of her own life, and what was worse, this depressed her senses. She saw Carmilla's beautiful dresses in her mind's eye and understood how they were a symbol of the lovely stranger's liberty, and that she had no such symbols of her own by which to alter her path. When Emma placed the rigid torture of her German lessons alongside this truth, her sense of enclosure only tightened about her skin. On the surface it seemed trivial, but deep inside her heart she suspected that her longing was much more than just a whim. Emma had begun to fear that if this state of mind could continue, then she knew she could not possibly ever accomplish a future. This internal conflict wrestled with her soul and it was an ideation only heightened one hundredfold by the prospects of a handsome young man like Carl Ebhardt courting her. There was no reality or truth to it, for he could only amount to a nonentity. His 'Prince Charming' affecting change in her existence was but a romance, a fiction, and could only ever be a ridiculous dream. In any case, why would he be remotely interested in her, had he not loved Laura?

'Yes,' replied Carmilla, her voice sharpening to a harder edge, as if she were aware of what Emma might be thinking. 'That is why the stars look so small in the night sky. When we look at them they seem small because they are far, far away. Looking at them we look to the past and the past is supposed to be revoked, but sometimes it is not. Abandoning the past, unfortunately, is not possible. However, we must learn from it and be guarded.'

'I don't understand,' Emma looked at Carmilla with wide eyes. 'Were you ever going to marry a handsome young man?'

Carmilla laughed in ridicule but did not answer. Instead, she made an ambiguous remark that suggested she would never wish for a young man, or an old one for that matter, and that men were an animal it was better not to know.

'Men will only try to control you,' she told Emma, glancing to the window with glittering eyes. 'Is that what you want, to be controlled?' She was biting down upon her lower lip to clamp down any further words that might come forth. It was almost as if she did not wish someone else, someone undefined, to know of their intimacies, someone who might be listening to their conversation. Carmilla gazed furtively into the dark.

'How do you know these things?' Emma asked almost absently, distracted again by the hot glow of Carmilla's ruby. Emma's voice trailed off and she appeared mesmerised, lost in a moment of wonder, marvelling at the depth of mind that lay hidden in the ivory coil of her friend's skin.

'There are many things to know,' replied Carmilla, 'and many things to learn, but let me assure you, men are not one of those things. Sometimes we never learn.' The ambiguous nature of her new friend confused Emma and the girl felt the strangest notion that Carmilla, talking in romantic circles, was deliberately evading some awful truth. Was it that Carmilla in her rejection of men was no better off than Terra? Was there someone controlling her life, someone for whom she was constantly watching, someone she feared? A little shiver caressed Emma's skin.

'Where do you suppose you will find a man who is worth your love and devotion?' Carmilla asked Emma.

'I am afraid that is but a foolish idyll,' Emma admitted, lowering her eyes, almost shamed. 'Yet you seem so sure that a worthy man cannot exist. How come you to be so erudite, as if you have known the ways of the world for a long time?'

'I just know,' was Carmilla's response and she touched the ruby at her throat.

'Then perhaps you are right,' said Emma in defeat.

'Perhaps,' was Carmilla's elusive answer and Emma turned back to her dresser as confused by the conclusion drawn as she was at the beginning of the conversation. She took up her brush. There was no way she could fathom her new friend, in fact she thought that no matter how long they might be friends, she would never really know her at all. Emma combed her strawberry blonde hair.

'Do read to me, Carmilla,' she sighed at length. She felt tired now and in need of fictional romance over depressing self-reflection. She dreamed Ebhardt's handsome face but she did not speak his name aloud, not to Carmilla. 'I feel in the mood for a love story.' Carmilla made a small and derisive half laugh and reached over to the bedside table. Here her hand paused in the air and a curious look rippled in her lovely features. Watching Carmilla linger made Emma's heartbeat skip, and she thought for one ghastly moment that her friend might discover the forbidden book strapped in concealment under the dresser. Carmilla simply blinked and picked up the fiction she had been reciting the night before and opened it at the ribbon, making herself comfortable in the chair by the window.

'She shook out her hair,' Carmilla began to read aloud, and Emma sighed with relief, 'and she blushed as his face and his lips came down to meet her own. His hot breath washed over her cheek. Pulling her gently towards him he showered her sweet upturned face with manly kisses.'

Emma sighed.

'This is a silly book,' laughed Carmilla, shaking her head at the ridiculous make-believe romance. She snapped the novel closed and was thankful that she did not have to read any more.

'I think it's a lovely story,' Emma protested.

'I do not think I can read it any more,' Carmilla sighed dismissively. 'This girl is so vapid. She will no doubt just fall into the man's arms, he will have his way with her and then lock her away, and that will be that.'

'What do you mean, Carmilla, have his way with her and lock her away?'

'You are so naive. If she gives him what he wants, and there is no doubt that she will, she must forsake her own life, her own needs, of course. Oh, how quickly you lapse and forget. Did Tera's story avail you nothing? She is a silly little fool who wants only for a handsome young man, but he won't bring her anything but misery. Men always bring misery. Do you not agree?'

'Oh,' said Emma passively, scarcely paying attention to Carmilla's harsh critical discourse and scarcely understanding the grave import of her friend's words. 'If only a handsome young man would come into my life, I know what I would choose immediately!'

The thought of Ebhardt bloomed again into her mind's eye.

'Do you really need one to come into your life?' Carmilla replied contemptuously. She had to stop herself from speaking her next thought aloud. She understood well enough that if Emma had her wish she would live to regret it most profoundly. Carmilla sometimes thought that men had a habit of locking pretty things away, pretty girls, because they coveted women as if they were treasure. When those temple priest could not have Tera, that is what they did to her, locked her body up in the dark. Why was this country estate any different from a tower room, from a dungeon, from a crypt, from a tomb in ancient Egypt? All these 'rooms' were remote and isolated and forgotten to the world. That is where you kept beautiful young girls so that they were never touched by any other man. In the story, the tower was always covered in thorns and the barbs were sharp and made the way to freedom impossible because the thorns ran deep and drew blood, sometimes they even put out your eyes. If the maiden were trapped then she was held in the dungeon or the tower with no hope of escape for the prison was always barred with iron grating and chains. So often the dungeon eventually became a crypt and the crypt supposed the coffin. All these places held the pretty thing captive in life and ultimately, they pointed only toward death, trapped not only the heart but also the will to live, and none of it equated to a fairy tale. Instead, it all seemed to repeat the fall of that legendary Egyptian queen who was punished for seeking her own agency and was doomed to pass eternity caught between two worlds, between the living and the dead. Did Emma really think that any man would treat her differently and that she would live happily ever after? Carmilla doubted it. She had cause to reason that the world of men was a world from which there was no escape once you were trapped in its guile. Oh yes, men promised much and they pulsed with the vibrant flesh, but to give in to them seemed to spell only a slow living death. That was the true gift of men, to kill you from the inside. The thought made Carmilla unhappy and she felt the acid taste of anger upon her tongue.

'I do wish Carl would come again,' said Emma absently, her big brown eyes growing even bigger. 'He's very handsome.' She pictured his face, his thick and curly black hair, his perfect nose, and strong chin. For a moment, she was held in his muscular arms and she imagined that she felt his body pushed against her own, his manhood hard upon her thigh. Lust swept her along and romance was exiled, and scenes from the 'Harem' filled her head. As he kissed her she gave in return a wanton, fervid kiss. Emma groaned lowly in her delicious enchantment but then she abruptly felt ashamed as if she were betraying her dead friend Laura by feeling attracted to her dead friend's beau.

'Who?' Carmilla replied, and although she tried to conceal it, her face betrayed her emotions with an annoyed flicker. 'It is likely that he too would make you a pretty thing,' Carmilla wanted to say in spite, but the words froze in her mouth. She knew she should not say them for Emma would learn that once the lustre of passion wore off, wore thin, well ultimately it spelled doom of one kind or another.

'Carl Ebhardt,' Emma returned, and how she seemed to linger over the young man's name oblivious to Carmilla's growing ire. 'He manages General Spielsdorf's estate. Do you know the General?'

'No.' Carmilla almost groaned. What ridiculous prattle was this that it bored her almost to distraction?

'His niece was my best friend,' Emma lowered her eyes, 'and then she died.'

'This is too much!' Carmilla vehemently ejaculated, unable to contain her rage. Her expression hardening, her blue eyes glowing cold fire, the beautiful stranger almost snarled. 'Oh, you chat on like an old peasant woman sometimes, always of death and tragedy!'

She rose from her chair and gesticulating angrily she took her post again by the window. Petulantly she turned her back upon Emma. The stars shone pale upon her almond skin and she appeared even more beautiful in the celestial glow despite her ire, her great mane of auburn hair cascading over her bare shoulders and tumbling down her back. Carmilla's red lips trembled in suppressed anger. With a covert but obvious shudder, Carmilla closed her eyes and bit down on her lower lip as if in doing so she might stem the flow of any further painful words. How could she tell Emma that her wisdom had been gleaned from the passing of centuries, that in remembering her own fall into darkness so long ago there was only pain, not romantic love. It hurt to think that she had once been young and might have lived a different life had she survived life's horrors. Now her existence seemed almost like a punishment, and she did not need any talk of handsome young men to make her feel better. Yet despite this realisation, she still felt cold in her heart and there was no space in there for one such as Carl Ebhardt. He represented all that Carmilla loathed, youth and vitality, vigour and sex.

'Carmilla, you are unkind!' Emma was positively hurt. She had expected her friend to understand and to have sympathy, but Carmilla seemed cold and almost brutal in her rejection. Perceiving her younger companion's wounded expression Carmilla's face abruptly softened.

'Emma, you know how it upsets me,' she said by way of justification.

'I'm sorry. Forgive me,' Emma said in contrition, but why she felt compelled to be repentant, she did not understand.

Carmilla turned back from the darkling glass and the moonlight lit her frame in halo. A night bird called from the blackness of the stencilled trees. For a short moment, she did not utter a word, but then it was as if she teetered upon the brink of tears. 'No, forgive me. I should not snap at you like that.'

'You are so sensitive.' Emma put down her brush and stood up. She had begun to feel a little uncomfortable, especially when Carmilla swung into one of these strange and passionate moods. At these moments, like the incident that had transpired this afternoon, Emma did not know how to react, it frightened her.

'Only about some things,' Carmilla whispered repentant, '...and about you.'

'Silly! Why about me?'

'Because I love you,' Carmilla said vehemently, throwing her arms about Emma, 'and I don't want anyone taking you away from me!'

Emma felt a thrill of repulsion and wanted to disentangle herself from Carmilla's embrace but found she had become immobile and almost impassive.

'Taking me away?' she asked, both confused and horrified. 'Who do you mean? You know we'll always be friends, Carmilla.' The beautiful stranger let her embrace drop and her face became a mask of rejection and sadness. Abruptly, as if she suddenly realised her own foolishness Emma ventured: 'Surely you don't mean my handsome young man? Why, I do believe you're jealous!'

Emma sounded incredulous although the weight of the implication was already pressing heavily upon her mind. In defence of her passion, Carmilla seemed nearly in denial of true love's first glimmering attraction.

Carmilla arched her eyebrows and her demeanour became defensive.

'Why should I not be?'

'Why? Because it's not the same thing,' Emma protested. 'It's different.' What else could she say to make her strange friend understand? Carmilla was so intense and her peculiar ardour reminded Emma somewhat of that forbidden novel in which she had read about women involved in a terrible imbroglio of infatuation and desire, participating in unnatural acts with other women. Carmilla's friendship seemed so often to teeter on this obsessive and outlandish aspect of that fiction. That passion grew stronger as the days passed, as the nights blackened all other thoughts in the tangle of awful dreams. In consolation Emma added, 'You know we'll always be friends, Carmilla.'

The beautiful stranger stroked Emma's hair, looming over her like a shadow, her arms rising and spreading like dark yet gossamer thin wings. The shadow engulfed Emma. Carmilla cupped Emma's heart-shaped face in her palms, her thumbs tracing the bow of the girl's lips and Carmilla gazed into Emma's large, stunned eyes. Carmilla trembled and her own eyes searched to the depths of Emma's soul, and Emma trembled too. Holding the pretty girl in the moonlight, Carmilla brought her face in close so that her cheek almost brushed the other's cheek.

'I want you to love me for all your life!' she implored, and Emma did not know how to answer, but she felt her heart trip and a strange chill swept through her body. Her skin tingled and she felt repulsed. With a muted click the bedroom door opened and Mademoiselle Perrodon broke the extraordinary tableaux with the sound of her voice. She was dressed ready for bed, her linen nightdress white, a crocheted shawl draped across one shoulder. Her bosom was half-revealed.

'Come along,' Mademoiselle said, holding the door open. 'That is enough chatter for tonight.'

Carmilla smiled and the intensity of her passion evaporated in an instant. 'Goodnight, Emma,' she said playfully as if the preceding conversation had not even happened, placing a light kiss on the young girl's cheek. She drifted from Emma's side with slow and deliberate steps and glided by Mademoiselle Perrodon as she passed through the door. Emma stood as still as a plank and watched as Mademoiselle pulled the door closed.

'Goodnight, Mademoiselle Perrodon,' said Carmilla, pausing and meeting the older woman's eyes. Their vision met and locked albeit for one scant second, but there was something in Carmilla's glance that spoke of an invitation and Mademoiselle felt a strange fire suddenly alight under her skin. 'You are so kind,' the girl added, leaning forward and kissing Mademoiselle on the cheek, her bosom softly pressing against that of the Governess. The kiss lingered with Carmilla's warm breath and Mademoiselle felt a flash of heat. Carmilla pulled away and moved towards her bedroom door, her lithe figure swaying slightly, its shape visible through the transparent fabric of her diaphanous nightdress. The Governess felt her throat go dry and she quickly turned away.

Emma Morton stood in her room, alone and bewildered. She was quivering and she thought for one ghastly moment that she might faint, and so to steady herself she sat down at the stool before her dresser. Her face filled the reflecting glass and she saw that she was so pale, pale as the moon and sickly, her lips were draining from pink to blue and her eyes were wide. Amid the fragments of insanity that assailed her mind, she knew that what had just happened was real. It was awful and yet not so unexpected, and to realise that Carmilla loved her like a man, like Carl Ebhardt might love her made a tight knot of sickness grip in her belly. Whatever was she to do, for how could she resist? She did not wish upon Carmilla a harsh rejection but she was scared by the girl's tumultuous passion. Outside, high up in the sky, the moon watched her, but to Emma its silver light only illuminated darker and more dangerous emotions. Such emotions had the power to wither a young love, to corrupt it and alter it, and she did not know what to do. Sitting for a while under a pall of uncomfortable silence, wondering if indeed she were now truly trapped, locked up and with no voice and so like those young girls in Carmilla's discourse, Emma began to tremble violently and then to cry.

Pestilence ravaged midnight. Bleeding from a mouth of oily shadows, it slid through the forest with alarming speed. It was angry. The moon had risen and the scattered stars over-sprinkled the velvet heavens, but the stars were blind to the crawling nightmare that wove between trunk and bough and silver leaf. The pestilence pulsated in the air, pushing a wave of fumigation before it. Forest creatures picked up the nasty scent, panicked and fled. Owls in their roosts took flight, voles burrowed deep into the earth, and only those persons sleeping nearby in the woodman's hut were ignorant to the fear. Revolting and malodorous the thing rushed to the window of the hut and its stench filled the aperture. Its stain was blacker than the night that had birthed it and there it shivered and throbbed. A broom made of bundled straw was propped against the mud plaster wall; the window had no glass but a wooden shutter held it tight against the dark. The dark flung the broom aside and pushed against the timber. The shutters creaked and groaned as they were pressed, and with probing, scrabbling fingers, the dark found the beam that blocked ingress and it coaxed it silently up and out from its brackets. The beam fell to the floor with a muffled thud and the shutters splayed open. The pestilence entered and the room went cold. On her rude pallet of straw, asleep, the woodman's daughter was dreaming. She dreamed that something black and vaguely beautiful came to her out of the dark and whispered a lurid invitation into her ear; she could even feel the wisp of its breath upon her cheek. That hot breath was sweet, fragrant like cradle-grass but stronger and more pungent. The girl dreamed, dreamed that the darkness asked if she wished to dance and she nodded that she might, and the night asked ever so melodiously that she let it come enter. Once she had agreed, speaking the words aloud, the barrier between her body and the dark dissolved; a boundary that was crossed by something distorted and yet concealed, something terrible and yet beautiful, alluring and yet dangerous.

The woodman's young daughter tossed about and moaned slightly and the dark and the strange agony that it brought was only rendered worse through her terrors. Whimpering the girl found that her own breath was stifled and that she gasped for air as the shadow spilled across the hard dirt floor. A wavering black arm stretched out of the sooty mist and splashed along the wall beside her cot. At the end of the arm formed the dancing lines of fingers and at their tips the lines became pointed and sharp. The dreamer waited with heightened anticipation, waited for the dark to penetrate below the surface of the dream, and erupt into her senses, senses that reeled even as she slept. Down the wall it slid and gathered its substance above her breast, a thing of smoke and sparks, of undulating vapours. There was a humming sound in the suffocating air, the sound of something beyond the stertorous breathing of her father as he slept in the adjoining room. It was a low tonal vibration that replaced the whispered command that had asked her to let it enter, the sound as of a cat purring, but amplified, much louder than any cat might sound. The purring grew louder still, and the shadow grew blacker and more solid, and it covered the girl with a shroud of rippling fur. Then with the sound came the thudding of her heartbeat, the tripping hammer that signalled the base urges within her being, a conflict of emotion and desire. The whisper became a song and the song was one of sublimation and of gratification and of something else, something altogether primitive and yet exciting. Heavily the shape settled upon the girl's body, hot and growing hotter, a stifling mantle of thick yet soft bristles that covered her from head to foot. It moved against her, pushing hard upon the girl's pelvis, thrusting against her, digging needled claws into her skin. She wanted to scream but could not, for something was filling up her mouth, something vile and thick and sticky. From what might have been a mouth, a feline mouth, a tongue flashed, a tongue rasped with burs and wet.

Obscenely the organ throbbed and pulsed and rippled in wavy vibration as it invaded the young woman's throat, disgustingly lubricious and choking, gagging away her gasping breath. The feral organ stretched the girl's mouth wide, pulling her lips painfully apart. She felt a dreadful agony, as if her tongue were being torn from her throat and the night began sucking, sucking and squelching at the tide of blood welling up from inside. In that paroxysm of fear the woodman's daughter found her waking mind and her eyes opened wide with terror, but it was too late, for the dark had penetrated her body and was consuming her flesh. She gave a gasping, gurgling spasm and tried to limply fend off her attacker, but her fingers only curled through smoke before they unclenched and were filled with emptiness. Blood vomited from the cavern of her mouth and the pestilence feasted until it was sated, gorging, and swelling until it could drink no more. Abruptly retracting its tongue from the corpse, the monster shuddered and belched and threw up, a wave of revolting red splashing over the stucco and straw, the cold airs stinking.

The woodcutter's wife awoke to a sound, a faint thud and a scratching noise that became a rattling against the shutter and a low-pitched growl. Reaching over to wake her husband, she found that he was not in his bed. A wave of fear surged through her body. If someone were prowling about the house she wasn't sure that she alone would be able to fend them off should they break in. She was surprised that her husband was not there in the bed beside her. Another growl sounded, moving swiftly in the night from one corner of the hut to the other. Then there came the noise of bracken and sticks snapping and a long scraping sound that dragged along the length of the rude building. She felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck and her arms pimpled into gooseflesh. Soon enough the sound was inside the hut, she heard it emanating through the thin mud and straw wall, coming from the room next to hers, the room in which her daughter slept. For a moment, she was frozen with fear and was unable to move, even though she told herself to get up out of her bed. She must find her husband. However, something held her down, an invisible restraint that weighed heavily across her breast. She struggled against it yet it held her rigid, and as she lay paralysed, she heard something else, an awful squelching, sucking noise. The sound was making her sick, and there was a vile smell in the air, as of meat that had spoiled. Clamped down she found that her vocal chords were unable to respond even though she wanted to scream. At last and with effort she managed to throw off the torpor that held her down and struggled to get up, and although physically shaken she found her feet and ran from the room. Through the adjoining room and the darkness, the woodcutter's wife picked her way by the suffused light of a candle. Guided by a feeble flame that sputtered on a wick that was almost expired, the woman inched forward. On a shelf above the spent hearth there burned another taper, and before the exhausted fireplace she glimpsed her husband slumped in a chair, his axe propped against the wall beside a pile of logs. The woodcutter's wife gave a groan, half of relief and half of terror, for she knew that he would be of no use because an empty ale flask lay at his feet. She shook him, but he did not respond. With force, she gripped him by the shoulders and shook him again. Even as she did this and called to him to respond, an awful noise sounded in the hut and rattled from her daughter's room.

The animal growling rose in pitch and as it fell upon her ear the woodman's wife had no choice but to abandon her spouse and move apprehensively toward the girl's door. The woman did not want to open that door, instinct told her that there was something terrible behind it, but she raised her hand and pushed upon the panel. As the door creaked opened, the woman saw only what the moonlight through the opened window illumined. The room was dim and chilly and a cold wind was blowing about the cramped space, and that space was awash with black shadows and glistening crimson. There was a lot of fluid spattered blackly all about the floor and the walls, and when the woodman's wife looked to her daughter's palette, she beheld a ghastly spectacle. She shook her head in disbelief and her hands flew to her mouth. Any moment now and the woman would vomit, she felt her stomach convulse, and with her legs shaking violently she stepped into the room toward the bed.

Her throat was seized so tight with terror that she could not call her daughter's name, could not even speak a word. As she stepped forward in the dark, her bare foot touched something wet and warm and pulpy. A sticky wetness squeezed between her toes and she looked down. There she glimpsed, in a jagged spear of moonlight, the colours of the dark in silver hue, but those colours were crimson and ragged and what was popping up through her toes was made of flesh, human flesh. It was an eye, her daughter's eye! The woodcutter's wife screamed and then screamed again. She screamed because her daughter was dead and the maiden's pretty face had been peeled from her skull.

Chapter 8

Ringstrasse

In which Mr. Morton visits Vienna.

On the western fringes of Vienna, at about eight o'clock in the evening, in an avenue just off the ring road, in the Gürtel, a carriage stopped before a painted and gilded door. Upon its green and gold panel hung a ring knocker, a Satyr embracing a prostrate and naked female; the knocker was cast in brass and the metal glowed under the fire of the street lamp. Mr. Morton reached up and his fingers curled about the knocker. He hesitated for a moment, turning a quick eye about the street, before giving the Satyr a swift and insistent thud. People had begun to gather in the avenue, walking slowly, some lingering by the sidewalk while others pedaled hot snacks from barrows. A gaggle of ruffian children had swarmed about his carriage, begging for money, and to keep them off he had thrown them a handful of coins. The chink of alms hitting the gutter sent them all scrabbling and Mr. Morton had strutted briskly up to that green and gold door. For a long drawn out moment, nobody answered his summons, and while he waited, Morton experienced an ever-growing excitation. His heartbeat had stepped up a couple of notches and his glance had become almost furtive. That glance quickly scanned the boulevard again as if expecting the vista to reveal a face that knew his own, but this 'lost' section of Vienna's Ringstrasse found him anonymous and happy to be so.

Morton had come to the Capital for economic reasons, and there had been three good English Gentlemen to meet this day regarding a trade proposal. The four of them had sat all morning in a Baroque little kaffeehäuser. They had talked and laughed and drunk coffee and talked some more, and then they had talked some more again until Morton was almost driven to the brink of boredom. Morton's thoughts were not his own and he had found it difficult to concentrate upon this business. Between several serves of strong coffee and various decadently sweet pastries the men chatted on and on like old women. It was not until after lunch that Morton finally broke from the group, excusing himself, saying that he had other business matters to which he needed to attend. Barely able to contain the weird itching drive that was pulling at the coil of his skin he left their company and headed toward Spittleberg. He was weary of the grind of business discussion and the dry politics that accompanied it, and he did not feel any longer in need to talk trade and commerce. The afternoon bid him spend some time killing the last hours like any other tourist in a cultural centre might, wandering about and visiting monument and park. Soon the students from the universities would be filling up the cafes, and there would those who would visit the theatre.

Morton had noted an advertisement across from the cafe in which they had sat all afternoon, an advertisement for the performance of a new opera 'The Tragedy of Joan of Arc' by some obscure fellow Englishman called Lord Ambrose D'Arcy. It had been suggested that after their talks concluded that all the gentlemen take in the opera and perhaps then gravitate to a drinking destination. Mr. Morton did not care for such diversions as the opera, and he understood what they could not, that their muscular capitalism might buy them only a moment's pleasure. There were more interesting pleasures to be had. Leave those who would soon be dancing in the music halls to the cabarets, forget those who would be imbibing generous libations of wine. None of that was what Morton needed to do to be fulfilled. He was not one of their ilk. Although he was hungry for food, he had purchased a slice of aphelstrudel at a little patisserie, he had taken a cab to the Zentralfriedhof, and there he walked quietly amid the endless aisles of tumuli and sculptured Seraphim. The sky was overcast and lent a grey texture to the cemetery. He was like one removed from the real world as he walked along slowly and read inscription after inscription, forgetting one declaration of eternal love and scoffing at numerous other dolorous messages of regret and sadness.

Here were elegantly wrought monuments of granite and marble, a gorgeous celestial city of richly ornamented tombs crumbling silently under the weight of neglect. Between the rows he passed, under eaves of carved stone, to roam mindlessly by biers sculptured with fractured rosettes and hung in rigid tassel. With flowing locks Beauty reclined upon an eternal bower, guarded by an angel clasping a wreath of laurel; a little boy in stone held up a candle to light his path to heaven, the Lord's Prayer was a broken stele at Morton's feet. Stone trumpets made a silent clarion call to deaf ears, harps and pipes and chiselled bouquets were detailed everywhere, defiled crosses and mouldering tumuli were aisles through which the wind blew. Morton paused a moment beneath a Seraph, his wide eyes fixed upon its benevolent visage, but Morton was not contemplating the divine but rather in contempt of it. Fading sunlight crackled through a fan of stone plumage. After about half an hour he sat on a bench and reclined, lazily, seated under a spreading yew, looking up at a female figure wrought in exquisite detail. His eyes followed the line of her encircling arms. The right hand of the figure clasped a naked bosom and the left clasped the wrist of the right. Above a long and slender length of throat, the sculptured eyes were half closed and the head was tilted skyward. There was rapture in the carved image's dreamy idyll. Morton found himself caught in a reverie, staring at the sublime sculpture and imaging that it lived and breathed. Unwrapping the pastry, he had purchased he took a bite. As the delicious sweet engorged his taste, he sighed and shut his eyes. A glorious tingling was under his skin; it had started hours ago and it had only become more intense. It itched at his insides, making heat in his loins. After a moment, he gulped and shook himself. A cloud passed over the stone forestry, rippling in a grey wave over broken limb and fanned plumage and along the tiled footpath. When the shadow washed over his own body, Morton cast his eyes across the path. Another sculpture taunted him with its sensual evocation of death. This one was a half figure carved in black marble, a torso with rounded curves and elegant lines; it was raised on an obelisk, its form beginning at the waist, its belly and breasts exposed by the fluid motion of arms and stone fingers that pulled up its treble veils, caught in the act of undressing for the final sleep. The head of the statue and its visage were concealed by the ripples of suggested fabric, but those breasts, they were beautiful and round and high, just like the bosoms of his beautiful house guest, Carmilla. Morton swallowed his mouthful of cake and then took another bite.

He liked cemetery art for there was something seductive in the evocation of death, something that appealed with a strange lure, it made his heart beat faster and his sex swell. He remembered the day he had found his own daughter lying on her mother's grave... how vulnerable she had looked. It made him think that if one could take another person to the portal of death, to the penultimate moment when the mantle of the skin almost surrendered to the wants of the grave, and to enjoy the pleasures the act gave, that was what he craved the most. The glorious beauty of death possessed its own unique poetry, but bringing someone to the point of death, that was something different altogether, that was power. His head reeled with the whispers of death, with the scents of death and with the caress of death, and to take someone submissive to its brink only brought on a deeper phrency. He could feel his fingers aching to encircle the lovely breasts of the girl Carmilla and then to slide slowly up to her splendid throat, there to squeeze and to squeeze. As if in response to his phantasy, the stone bust before his gaze came to life. It was stretching out its arms, welcoming his stroke, his commands, and his domination. He was tracing his trembling, quivering lips over that cold marble skin, kissing its belly, exploring the indentation of the umbilicus with his tongue. He held those sculpted hands and he was tying off those slender wrists with a rope corded from the veils that covered the face. Morton was going hard; his sex was throbbing painfully. Soon his mind filled up with gasps and groans and pleadings and he heard his own voice calling curses and derogatory accusations, and the faceless image struggled against him, bound and gagged and humiliated. The face he saw was the face of his dead wife.

Perhaps Morton dozed for a bit, for time seemed certainly to have stopped, with his arm extended by his side along the seat, his fingers quivering but still clasping the apple pastry. An owl fluttered from a tree and dipped low above his head, her keen eye trained upon the scurrying rat. The sun was going down now, the shadows stretching out, the sky streaked with crimson. With a bleary eye, Morton returned from his torpor and looked down at the uneaten half of his strudel as if he could not comprehend what it was. It was all over ants. Rejecting it, he tossed it into the hedge garden, scrunching up the paper wrapper that had bound the strudel and throwing it as well to the earth in disregard. Perhaps it was time to go. The Englishman rose and stretched his arms. He felt his spine ripple and his fingers flex. With a blink and a slight shake of the head, Morton walked slowly to the cemetery gate. A little breeze stirred the fall of autumnal leaves about his feet as he strolled up the gloaming path, and from some hidden and secretive place amid the tumuli he heard a sharp and startled screech. The owl had snared its quarry and soared into the purple sky with the rat dangling from its claws. Morton watched it into darkness and then stepped out into the street. There he waited near the curb for a vacant cab.

It was night when Morton alighted in the Gürtel. As the street lamps were lit yellow and the first strains of the gaudy nightlife were beginning to appear, Mr. Morton hesitated before the viridian portal and its brass Satyr. He saw heavily rouged women in purple velvet and saffron taffeta, clad from head to foot in the plumage of birds of paradise. These women were popping up upon the street corners and men in tall hats and long cloaks passed slowly by, watching the women. The noise was growing as the crowds became thicker, as the ring came alive with the theatrical and the solicitous. Taking a deep breath Morton pounded the knocker again and abruptly the door opened. A middle-aged woman stood in the door frame, her hair was pulled up in a tight bun, and her lips were a slash of moist ruby. She stood with her hands on her corseted hips and she looked upon him with a cold and steely eye, paused as sentry, blocking the pass. Their eyes met but the two exchanged no words. She extended her hand and Morton took a billfold from his pocket and placed many creased paper notes into the woman's palm. An urchin called out an obscenity from the other side of the circuit and taunted the woman from behind the shelter of a parked carriage. The woman ignored the ruffian and did not look beyond Mr. Morton as she sequestered the money in a velvet purse that dangled from her hip on a corded rope. With a swish of silk, she turned about.

'Bolt the door,' she muttered, turning her back upon Morton, 'and follow me.'

'I know the way…' he began to protest, but she silenced him with a cold glance and stepped with corked heels down a carpeted hall.

On both sides of the corridor were doors, and each door was painted in a bright and gaudy colour. Noises were seeping from under those doors, moans and sighs and whispers of voluptuous pleasures, both female and male. There were other sounds too, like the tintinabulae of bells and the exotic strains of mandolin music that wove under the curses and groans. Morton's throat ran dry. Muffled and yet somehow melodious he heard a female voice reciting a stream of erotic verse by Brantôme, a musical description of exciting and perverse pleasures:

'And gasping on the brink of death,

In the wild accents of despair

With many a sigh I poured my prayer

A golden bed

Beneath us spread

There clasp'd in many a fold

While bashfully she struggled yet,

My arms the blushing wanton hold.'

Morton heard the recitation and it was a lure, a magical spell, and he could smell the odours of heady perfumes, of incense and burning candles and the Madam led him to an open salon where half-a-dozen pretty girls lounged in bored apathy, draped over velvet chaises under a gaudy chandelier. Peacock feathers splayed in porcelain vases, a gilded Cupid strung an arrow to a bow above the dripping festoon of a garish Austrian blind. Suffused light twinkled from the candles flickering in the chandelier making Morton's vision waver. The light glowed dully upon rouged cheeks and lips and half-revealed stocking-clad thigh and corseted breast. A girl made up to resemble a doll stood reciting a book of erotic verse, another with raven locks sat off to the left on a divan; she had a live snake curled along the length of her arm, its tail dangled and undulated slowly above her pubis, and she was stroking its head. The serpent was fat and might have been as tall, stretched from head to tail, as her own body. Mr. Morton saw in the dull illumination that the girl was naked, and that between her slightly parted legs hung the truth of her sex, a flaccid penis that the snake's forked tongue flicked and tasted. The snake and the woman both repulsed him and his face screwed up in disgust. This perfumed garden did not need such a snake amid its foliage. Another girl sat with her legs spread wide, the cleft of her sex fully visible; she was reading from a leather-bound volume and tracing a painted fingertip along her thigh and over her vulva. No one paid her any attention as she caressed herself and moaned. Two of the girls rose slowly and moved to greet Mr. Morton, one held out her hand to him but he brushed her aside.

'None of these,' he told the Madam, dismissing the women with a disdainful gesture, but she responded only with an arched eyebrow and kept walking past the salon and into the end of the hall. The girls that had risen and been rejected drifted away to linger like painted mannequins against a mirrored wall. In that silver glass were reflected the two-fold truth all the wavering images that passed before its pale argent pool, customer, whore and snake, and it expanded the room as much as it presented the duality of all things. The mirror was unto a portal into another plane of existence, one through which desire might pass and merge with the phantasy, and the phantasy was the realm where the dream met with the flesh. All wonder and fulfillment, all of life's unreality was to be glimpsed in that hoary pool, but life's pains and pleasures could only be experienced down the hall in a little realm beyond this lacklustre sheen. The Madam strode on for a few paces, passing through a passage that was decorated with paintings of risqué scenes, of women who were being entered from behind and of men being entered in the same fashion. Some of the images were rendered in graphite and some in watercolour. In one frame, a woman took a man's member into her mouth while another man's tongue was plunged into her behind. Another depicted a woman and a goat. The view was close and the flesh tones most realistic. Morton swallowed drily and the woman led Morton to the end of the corridor. The murmuring and sighs that issued through the walls fell away and a giggling recitation of Wilmot's Farce of Sodom faded:

'My pleasures for new cunts I will uphold

I have reserves of kindness for the old.

I grant in absence dildo may be used

With milk of goats, when our seed's infused

My prick no more to bald cunt shall resort-

Merkins rub off, and often spoil the sport.'

The whores all fell to laughing out loud, much to ridicule the new customer's aloof disdain, and Madam took a lighted candle from a sideboard and ushered the way down a flight of spiral stairs. Morton followed her into a well of darkness. At the bottom, in the pit, the air was perfumed with pungent incense, a smell that masked the odour of mould, and there across a secret way hung a drape sewn from black velvet. Madam reached up with her free hand and pulled the heavy curtain aside revealing an unadorned black door. Behind that door, thought Morton, would be a pretty maid, she who was locked up in the dungeon, a girl to do his bidding, with no opinions of her own save that she would provide the vessel from which he would drink to gratify his lusts. Madam knocked upon that door. Morton felt his sex hardening in his breeches, a thin film of sweat had broken upon his brow. The shadows and the blackness danced in the wavering candle flame. A small voice answered the knock.

'Who's there?' the voice queried, wavering demurely as it slipped between the black spaces of timber and shadows.

'Open the door,' Madam commanded, her thin lips a dual scarlet ribbon that moved in the wavering candlelight. The orange candle flame flickered in the gust of Madam's expelled breath and Morton's shadow danced upon the wall. He licked his lips in anticipation.

'Yes, Madam,' the reedy voice replied and the door creaked immediately ajar. The light from within was red, stained through tapers that burned within crimson glass, and the red light spilled over all three faces as if they were awash with blood. A pretty young girl was hovering just beyond the door frame. She was dressed only in a tight corset and stockings. Madam did not enter, but stood aside and waved Mr. Morton within. Before Morton had stepped over the threshold, Madam leant forward and whispered in his ear.

'You know the routine. A woman may yield to a man's vigour but I expect the correct conduct. I want no scandal attached to my establishment.'

Morton dismissed the Madam with a wave of his hand and thought how nonsensical was the implication of scandal. The pretty girl bowed and stepped back, her cowed eyes watching the gentleman intently as he stepped through the door. Once he was within the door closed with an audible click and Madam's heels sounded her ascent on the wooden steps without. Morton and the girl were alone. He stood in a room decorated in vermillion and slate. There were mirrors fixed to the ceiling that threw back the red and the fiery lamplight, and the light was filtered through gaudy red and black silk. A great mirror commanded another wall.

'What do you want with me?' the pretty girl asked timidly as Morton began removing his cloak, vest and cuffs. Her eyes were like a rabbit's eyes, big and furtive and darting, coloured brown but with red burning centres from the light of the lamps. The girl stood before the wide and full-length mirror, unmoving, dressed in her corset and stockings, a silk flower pinned to her garter. Morton observed his own reflection, but she did not have a face. This girl with her powdered heart-shaped visage and great spots of rouge seemed uncannily to resemble his daughter, like a doll with no personality. That daughter was such a vapid little thing, like unto the mother, the mother who had taken a knife and slit her own wrists because she could not deal with her demons of the mind. He pondered his wife briefly, thought of her once tender, young white flesh and how his whip had stung that flesh. How her naked form had bled from wheals and scratches and cuts and how her desperate cries of pain had become cries of despair. The more she had begged him to ease the kiss of the lash the more furious he would become. She had failed to understand his profound authority and that the misery of her life was for the exultation of the joys of his. Her virtue should be forgotten, her tears were only tears of pride, and her body was merely a vessel for his pleasure alone, even if he chained, lashed, cut, or burned its lovely panoply.

'You are an abomination!' she had accused one lost and stormy past evening, sobbing and clutching her torn body as it dripped tears of blood. She had looked like a spectre, like a revenant in the volts of flashing lightning and each strike of his hand had been smothered by the roar of thunder. He remembered with relish the spurt of his vital essences as he had struck at her. In response to her charge, he had told her that she was infinitely proud and that her pain was arbitrary. By contrast, she should worship the ferocious sting of the lash and that its jubilations kept the seeping core of woman from idle fancy. Her defiance could not be tamed and to reprimand her he had forced upon her various other cruel and terrible indignities. She was made to suffer whippings and tribades with faceless street whores, oral and urinal humiliation punishments, all of which had eventually driven her to the grave. By and large, Morton had discovered that it was Death who titillated and thrilled him most, and Death who stimulated the uninhibited forces of his external and internal world. Thoughts of his wife now provoked anger, and in its rising tide, his coil was made rigid with excitement. It was the opposite of his public face, that bumbling and confused but kind English gentleman who was so pale and emasculated that nobody ever noticed the strength of the beast within. He was the giver of pain and his lust could only be satisfied with orgies of flagellation that tore the flesh to the scorching seam of extinction. This girl, this whore that stood before him, she would enable his pleasure because she was no different to any female flesh, and merely a dolly to be played with, to be abused and shamed and ill-treated. No matter what, these women all bespoke the image of his wife and of her horror refutation for his authority.

Yet that woman was grievously afflicted in the mind, and she had pathetically bemoaned that his coarse actions upon her were unpardonable sins. Thus, his wife's deep rejection of his command had spurned the beast. Recalling this insolence, as Morton stripped this whore with his eyes he also stripped his dead wife at the same moment. As he did so he also defiled his daughter, Emma. He tore away their dowdy dresses to expose the festering core of all female manifestation and clothed each of them in the garish attire of the slut. This girl would yield unto him tonight, her flesh would take him straight on 'til morning and she would beg him to stop, but he would not.

'Over to the sofa,' he commanded, not even looking at the girl as he spoke. She obeyed and clasped her hands before her, white fingers interlaced, red tipped with long and pointed nails. She did not sit down. Their reflected images in the tall mirror burned with a larval heat and Morton wavered in the glass as if consumed by flame, a halo of glowing radiance emanating from his form. He told the whore that she was now the 'Master's girl' and she nodded in agreement. She appeared fragile and breakable, the dove whose wings he would clip; her body rendered exactly the way that he liked, her hair soft with cascading chestnut curls, her vermillion lips glistening in the Stygian glow of the red lamps. This girl, this body, was his property now, his to do with as he pleased, he was its owner. The girl closed her big brown eyes for just a second and Morton reached forth abruptly and cupped her bosom. She stiffened and her eyes flashed open, and Morton squeezed roughly and pulled sorely at the nipple. The girl reached up to pull his hands away and he clasped her wrists in a vice-like grip leaving indentations in her skin. He grunted though his face remained impassive, but his fingers were cruel, digging in deep and the doll squirmed and gasped and her Master spun her about.

'Don't move!' he warned her, his tone become hard. 'Move only when I tell you to move. Do what I tell you to do,' and his eyes were aglow, 'and I won't hurt you… too much!' The girl's breasts tumbled free and then the man tore the silken flower from her garter, peeling the band away roughly, rending the stitched-on rose and tearing her stockings to her ankles. At length, she stood naked and trembling, and waiting for his instructions. Even though she was no innocent, and had known different tastes, there was something about the violence in this man that frightened her. That she might have to yield and be supplicant did not bother the whore at all, but a strange portend told her that Morton wanted to truly hurt her flesh, to punish and debase her, and to take her beyond what was natural. Terrified that she was trapped and could not flee she began to whimper. She knew she could feign her pleasure but how was she to conceal her pain? She might scream until this man was satiated in his cruelty but no one would come. Her agonies would avail nothing for she must play the victim even as she was the victim. For one foolish moment, she thought that she might be able to buy her liberty by throwing herself at his feet, upon his mercy, but that was not possible for to Morton her flesh only constituted the body and the soul of the female corrupt. Not that decency mattered to this man. His obsession was to hurt, to bring his victim to the point of death and that passion was coming upon him as he loomed over her, breathing like a stamping bull, licking his lips, his eyes afire.

On a stand to the right of the sofa were six silken ropes, all were black. They flowed like thick glistening hairs across the marble, and next to them was a bone handled whip, and its thongs dripped like ink over the edge of torment into the red pulsing airs. Laid beside the whip was an ivory godmiché, long of shaft and sculpted at its base where it was studded to a heavy leather strap with a glinting silver buckle. Morton reached over and picked up one of the silken ties, and forcing the girl to bend over the settee he began to bind her wrists behind her back.

'That hurts,' she began to protest as the silk tightened and cut into her white skin, and Morton thrust aside her cascade of brown locks and gripped the back of her throat, forcing her pretty face lower. He squeezed so hard that she gasped and tried to squirm free.

'You are nothing. You are less than a piece of the furniture,' he told her, releasing his grip and leaving a red welt. 'Don't speak unless I tell you to, and call me 'Master' when you do.'

'Yes, Master,' she replied obediently. When her wrists were firmly bound Morton quickly undid the laces of her bodice. The corset unfurled and splayed open like the wings of a dead moth, dangling tangled threads, and he tossed it to the other side of the red room. Her exposed breasts ached from the hardness of his hands, the blush of finger marks having made deep pink bruising against their creamy softness. The girl sobbed and tried to turn around but Morton held her down.

'You are a slut,' he told her, 'a dirty, filthy whore.'

'Yes, Master, I am a slut,' she reiterated, closing her eyes and tensing her body for the blasphemous moment that would come. Not only had he physically stripped her skin, but he had stripped away the poetry of pleasure with the violence of his lustful carnality. Though her flesh looked pure and as unsullied as a white rose, stained carmine under the hellish glow of the lamps, he knew she was tainted. This whore must learn the correct behaviour, the slut's place among the superior male. The foul and debauched coil that was woman always provoked a longing within the male soul that could never be satisfied. Woman had to be corrected and made obedient or else she must die. This whore was but an instrument for his lust. He would satisfy his temporary passions with her body, and his pleasures would culminate in an orgy of flagellation and punishment. In the end, she would beg him to release her flesh unto God.

The candles wavered and the red light flickered and the black room danced with ruby shadows. The mirror watched on like a lecherous accomplice, making the sequence worse twofold. It saw two whores, two punishers, and two whips. Morton spat upon his fingertips and reached down. She thought that he would begin by stroking her sexual artifices but instead she felt his coarse touch exploring her body from behind. His slick fingers brushed against her forbidden places and the prostitute wanted to cry out, but she knew that if she did there would be more pain than she could bear. Morton's breathing became harder, and until this moment he had kept his anger in, but the girl's exposed behind and the perfume wafting from her vulva only drove him mad. He stabbed four fingers of one hand into her, deeply and agonisingly, spreading the rose bud until it was bruised and swollen, and with the other hand, he reached across for the whip.

From the ether, a bell was peeling languidly, sounding a hollow echo in the dark. Emma could hear the mournful tolling and she wished that she did not. She was frightened that it was a herald for the dead, a prophecy of a most significant nature, and she covered up her ears with her hands, but the sound would not be banished. Just beyond the garden, beyond the vale, through the forest, the sound of the solitary bell came tolling, tolling, drifting from the ruined church. Superstition suggested that the sound of a ghostly bell, ringing of itself, was an omen of impending disaster. Had her life not already been plagued by despair, by death? First her mother and now her best friend, and all that followed thereafter were useless lamentations. Emma had become fearful that her life was becoming a piteous spectacle, one through which a loathsome, nameless horror leered at her as it passed.

At seven o'clock cook had served dinner, and in Roger Morton's absence, Mademoiselle Perrdon and Emma were the only two who attended the table. Mademoiselle ate sparsely, and Emma felt that she could not eat at all. Carmilla had complained of a headache and did not appear at the evening repast. In lassitude, Emma Morton had returned to her room, to bathe and to ready herself for bed. Lying in her bed, unable to read any turgid romance, in the dull light of the lamp, Emma watched the sterling moon through her window as it climbed into the purple sky dome. There were no stars and no clouds, but there were many crawling, writhing shadows. The room spun with shadows. The girl was afraid to close her eyes lest the monstrous cat leap from those shadows. How she loathed the spectral visitation, purring and seductive and warm and heavy as it stretched over her body, even as the room became cold as winter frost, and as dark as the grotto of a wolf's mouth. Even poor little Gustav made a wide berth of her bedchamber. The only visitant now was Carmilla, beautiful and tender Carmilla... hauntingly lovely but enigmatic and yet possessed of a baleful and lethiferous predisposition. Was Emma ever to know what enchantment bedeviled her estranged friend, what strange and innominate love held her heart? It was a puzzlement and it consumed Emma Morton, and after some hours of sleeplessness, the girl got up from her bed and walked to the window. That was when she heard the tolling of the bell, and the faint echo sent a terrible shiver through her nerves. Suddenly a knock rapped upon her door. For a moment Emma was transfixed and she could not move nor answer, but the knock came again and without abide the door handle descended and the panel swung back soundlessly on its brass hinges. No one entered from the darkened hall.

'Who is it?' Emma asked nervously, her heart racing. 'Mademoiselle?'

'It's only me,' said a reedy voice, and a pretty girl entered through the blackened portal. She came forward, gliding, as if her feet did not touch the carpet, and she was dressed in a burial shroud. Horrified, Emma stifled the scream in her throat, and with terrified eyes she watched on helpless as the shadows rippled in the night visitor's wake. The room swum inky and oily, the light of the moon became hazy and waxen. Emma Morton almost gasped aloud. 'This must be a dream, another nightmare, surely!'

'You cannot be dreaming, for am I not here?' replied the waif, and she hovered before Emma and her cheeks were all pasty and wan, her eyes flickering from the deep black hollows in her face.

'How can you be here with me, Laura?' Emma sobbed, and to soothe her, Laura reached up a cold hand and touched Emma's arm. Emma shivered and recoiled. 'You're dead!'

'Don't be frightened,' said Laura, and she glanced out of the window and stared into the night with her vacant, black eyes. After the passing of a quick succession of heartbeats, the ghost spoke again. 'Come,' Laura commanded. 'Let us go to the ruin.'

'Now?' declared Emma. 'Oh, no, I could not. I am not strong and it is dark. I am fearful.'

Laura drew in close and put her arms about Emma. Her embrace was as cold as ice. 'When I was a child,' the ghost of Laura Spielsdorf intoned, 'I was always afraid. There was a long corridor in my father's house, and at night I had to go through it to get to my sleeping chamber. Along that corridor were suits of armour. I used to think that they were giants, standing there with their pikes and their swords, ready to come alive and terrorise me. When I cried, my mother told me that I was being silly, and she had one of those giants pulled down from its pedestal and taken apart. The suit of armour was empty.'

'I do not understand what you are trying to tell me?' said Emma, her flesh trembling, her lips quivering.

'Have courage,' said Laura. 'Come,' she insisted.

'To the ruined church?' said Emma, frozen with anxiety. She told herself that she was dreaming and that she must wake up now, but she could not. It was horrible, like all the other nights, only this time there was no great beastly cat but a visitor from beyond the grave to haunt her bedchamber.

'Let us go and see,' urged the spectre. 'We shall know for whom the bell tolls!'

'No!' cried Emma. It rang out for her death, to entice her to a place where there was no ray of sunshine, to an unhallowed grave.

'You must,' the ghost contended. 'You are no longer a child. Your fear is just your imagination, like my giants and armour. Prove to yourself that you can conquer your horrors. Quickly, let us go!'

The dead Laura looked upon her living friend, and in her eyes Emma caught a brief reflection of her pretty heart-shaped face, and the image of Carl Ebhardt was there too. The young man was looking back at her, and Emma gasped in shock. A terrible weakness flooded through Emma's body and soul. As if she were aware of Emma's desire, as if she knew her friend's innermost thoughts, Laura's black eyes flamed and the image of Carl was burned away. The ghost turned and ran towards the door, gripping Emma by the hand and dragging her unwillingly along. As they passed through the door, Emma snatched up a shawl and it trailed along the floor in her wake as the two fled into a night of dark shadows.

Into the garden they ran, and the bell was calling, clanging and ringing Emma's name. It sounded loudly now, ominously, as the two young women approached. Dressed only in their nightclothes, Emma and Laura entered the dark, but the moon picked them out and silvered the way. The night was hushed and nothing stirred but that faraway tolling, growing louder and louder as they drew closer and closer. It poured forth jagged notes, a warped and haunted melody shuddering through the black folds of night, and it was insistent. They skirted the flowerbeds and walked quickly under the holly and the sweet briar; in the dark Emma did not see the withered asphodels and hyacinths curled parched on the ground, not that she would have comprehended the significance of the trail of death over which she passed. They left behind the decaying roses that were strewn in the lawn and knew not that something evil had passed this way.

'Why does that bell keep ringing? It scares me- and where is Carmilla?'

'Indeed, the bell taunts us,' said Laura as they ran, 'but maybe it is just ringing in the wind. Perhaps there is a storm brewing.'

'No,' returned Emma, 'it cannot be, for there is no wind, and there isn't a single cloud in the sky. Look, you can see as far as the mountains, and the moon is bright!'

The forest and the night airs were still, all about was motionless, and a strange anxiety gripped the atmospheres.

'It rings from the ruined church tower in the valley, and if there is no wind then somebody must be ringing it!' cried Emma, and her visitor turned about and cast her ashen face into the dark. She seemed to be furtively searching for an elusive vision, and her eyes alone glimpsed a shade mounted on horseback, posed upon the periphery of the garden. The shade was a maelstrom of churning shadows, and it had long and sharp animal-like teeth that sparked white in the moonlight as it grinned hideously. The dead girl smiled and drew her companion forward.

For a moment, to catch a breath, Emma paused shivering beneath the shadow-laced canopy of an ancient oak, beside which rippled the inky waters of an ornamental lake. The light and the dark played like a shadow-pated lunacy over the water. Spectral things, both women, one from the land of the dead and one approaching that realm's boundaries, were slivers of stark white splintering the blackness of the night. Soon, Laura grew impatient, and pulling at her companion they glided over rather than stepped upon the ground, Laura's grave cerements clinging to the curves of her body, her hair a halo of flax through which sparks of moonlight scintillated like tiny fires. She was dishevelled and her aspect was fervid, searching the darkness with mad eyes- and something was following them. Emma sensed the presence, for as they ran the shadows lengthened and the darkness deepened. She felt a thrill of terror go through her body, instinct told Emma that something was terribly wrong and that perhaps her life was in danger. No, this was not the friend she knew, the pretty and vivacious girl that she had been going to visit- Laura was an apparition, a delusion.

As if anticipating her pretty companion's intentions to flee, Laura gripped Emma's hand tighter. Her hand was a clasp of ice. Emma gasped, but she couldn't run now.

'Come, not too far now and we will know.'

'You're cold,' Emma squirmed, and her trailing shawl caught in the bracken, tugged by phantom fingers.

Laura lead the way through the mottled shadows, walking so fast that Emma found it difficult to keep pace, and the hand that gripped hers, it seared her skin as if it were tinged by frost. The bracken and the dead leaves hurt Emma's bare feet but Laura would not relent nor slow her step. Soon the Morton house and the old oak and the underbrush were left behind and the moon high above was an argent lamp that paved the way with apprehension. With her throat frozen, Emma could not even cry out, for the night world unyielding rushed them onward, gulping them down into the shadows. At length, they came upon a long, high wall over which a thick vine crawled, and along the length of the stones they moved as spectres move, blending whitely into the swirling carpet of ground fog that divided as they ran. Rapidly, they sprinted past midnight and a great iron gate opened the way before them and they passed through. Inside the gate was the crumbling edifice of a stone tower, all rotting timbers, held together by a tenacious weave of spiky briars and brambles. From its belfry, the bell could be glimpsed rolling slowly back and forth.

'Come,' commanded Laura, and a she spoke there was intent and even malice in her voice. Something lascivious and perverted. A look of elation and carnal joy was a cloud that darkened Laura's ghastly corpse face.

A few steps later and the two young women had come up to the door, a splintered portal on rusted hinges, flanking either side of the way. The door flew back at a touch, falling inward with a soundless roar, and within the blackest of black spaces the moonlight flooded. There was a dog, a big black hound, and it snarled and snapped wildly, leaping up upon its hind legs and biting at something dangling in the dark. What Emma beheld tore a shriek of horror from her lips, and the ghost of Laura Spielsdorf gave a cracked and hideous laugh, pointing to the hanged corpse of a one-eyed hunchback, the bell rope looped about his snapped neck. A gory tide of blackened blood streamed from his slack mouth, and his limp body bobbed obscenely up and down as the dog bit at his ragged shoe.

With a scream, Emma awoke from her nightmare and screamed again until she fainted.

Chapter 9

Everybody Must Die!

In which the funeral of the Woodman's daughter reveals a dark insight into Carmilla's character.

Leaves fell from twigs like spent teardrops as Carmilla and Emma passed along the garden walk by the great oak. Emma put out the cup of her hand to catch some of the falling leaves in her palm. Autumn was mid-way through and winter seemed an age away, still the day was warm and the sun was bright. The two women strolled languidly along a path that led to a gazebo, Carmilla insisting that they walk under the trees. The filtered shade dappled the blue hues of their dresses with shadow lace. Emma carried a book to read, the romance that Carmilla had been reciting in the evenings before bed, and she looked forward to sitting in the sunlight and imagining the handsome lover in the story was her own love. It might be Ebhardt who touched her cheek, who kissed her lips... if only... if only. Up to the gazebo they came where a delicately fragrant climbing rose had gone wild about its timbers and lattice. Threaded into the roses was an untamed vein of ivy. The roses were turning sere and fading, the ivy had taken on a hue, more opaque than viridian.

Three steps up to a niche trimmed in the foliage, and there they came upon a bench seat. The girls seated themselves under a rain of soft petals and looked back upon the road that had brought them to this spot. The way was a picturesque walk up and down inclines and vales; it led past the Morton house and all the way to the village, many kilometres beyond the forest. Carmilla moved into the shade and the shadows as Emma reclined half exhausted upon the open steps in the sunshine. Walking certainly took up a good deal more of her strength and energy now and she was glad for the rest. She placed her romance novel in her lap and her other hand strayed to her bosom. A single pink blossom caught her eye and Emma reached out to pluck the flower. The rose bit into her fingertip with a little fanged thorn and she flinched. A tiny floret of blood welled to the tip. At the sight of the scarlet droplet she sighed and it came flooding in again, that horrible, doom-laden notion that her dreams could not be stopped and that she was falling once again into melancholia. As the blood flowed out of her veins so did her life and Emma hated the dreams and the madness that came with the night. Carmilla was watching intently, watching as Emma kissed away the drop of blood, and the beautiful stranger's eyes fluttered and her frame shuddered. Carmilla, as if caught in a dream herself, momentarily felt as though she were somewhere else, in a place where something dark reigned and where her flesh rotted and was reconstituted, where the stars were destroyed and reborn, where time ceased and yet began again. If Emma might have turned about to face her friend she would have believed that Carmilla were upon the brink of fainting. However, Emma did not notice her friend's strange reaction as she licked at the tip of her finger and at the redness of her blood. A light smear of crimson daubed her lips where the fingertip had touched.

'Emma, are you hurt?' questioned Carmilla in concern, her voice fragmented and low, her blue eyes sparkling and glazed. It took a moment for the girl to recover her composure.

'No,' said Emma, who quite suddenly felt parched and thirsty, as if her mouth and throat had filled up with desert sands, for the blood had tasted salty and unpleasant. The droplet had flowed over her tongue, and it had coursed and throbbed in a red iron tide down her throat and spread probing tendrils throughout every artery, every muscle and every nerve of her body. Emma felt dizzy and took her finger from her mouth. The speckle of blood stained her lips, glistening like a pomegranate seed. She didn't understand what she was feeling or why, and so she took a deep breath. A change was happening to her, within and without, a sense of something that was impossible to fathom, and it was drawing her into its web like a spider spins to trap the moth. Emma had begun to feel the call of dissolution, to feel the threads binding her bones unravelling. The call was singing her down to dust. The spell thrilled and frightened her and in the terrible confusion of it all she also knew that she could only wait for its passing, though waiting was timeless and a minute might as well have been a millennium. For a moment, she had completely forgotten about Carmilla. When her lovely companion spoke again it was to comment that Emma appeared tired and asked if she wished to return to the house. Emma shook her head and responded that she did not, that the afternoon was beautiful and that she did not want to spend it confined to her lonely prison. If she went back now Mademoiselle would only pester her and the day would be over so much faster and the dreaded night would come pouring in from the dim west. She looked back at her new friend and the girl's face was obscured in shadow.

'Carmilla, why do you always sit in the shade?' Emma asked at length, having noted that her friend invariably preferred the shaded ways, that she always sauntered under the trees and that she never came down from her room until late in the afternoon.

'The sun is too bright for me,' countered Carmilla. 'It hurts my eyes.'

Although she smiled there was something in her expression that bespoke of envy perhaps that Emma was free to bathe in the golden light of the star and that her mortal coil would not burn under its radiant shine. Emma could not know this.

'Then close them, it's glorious' said Emma, doing just that, shutting out the brightness with a flutter of her long and curling lashes. 'You can feel the warmth penetrating. It's like life.'

'Like life!' thought Carmilla, shaking her head. How foolish was her friend and so innocent and childlike, did she even know what life was all about?

'You talk such nonsense sometimes,' Carmilla told Emma, resting her chin on the back of her lily-white hand and twisting up her lovely mouth into a derisive smile. 'If only you understood that the brightness of the sun's rays can be a bad thing too, I assure you.'

'A bad thing?' What could be so dreadful about the sun and how could something so warm and bright threaten one's life? Emma opened her eyes and stared at her friend, and while she looked upon that impossibly lovely face she concluded that Carmilla had a habit of saying the most confusing things. Emma was still at a loss to fathom just what Queen Tera's tale was supposed to mean. Perhaps she would never know. As if she had read Emma's thoughts yet again Carmilla directed her glance to Emma and began, like she always did, with a strange and profoundly disturbing explanation that made no sense at all.

'That star gave everything its life and it can take life away too,' she uttered, looking quickly away and off into the distance, as if searching for something, for someone. She did not speak again until, it seemed, that she was certain they were alone. Carmilla wanted to tell her friend that she knew much more about such things than anyone might ever guess, that the sun was a star just like all the other stars they saw in the night sky and that like all things it too would eventually die. However, she herself could never die. To die, in the physical sense, perhaps, but to be truly dead... This fragile semblance of human flesh that she wore might end but her driving essence would not. It would continue beyond man's temporal experience and transform into whatever creation it needed to survive, into something new beyond a million suns. Whatever energy fired the depths within her flesh was much older than even that ancient star, and that energy as old as the mysterious substance that formed the universe. Yet how could she explain to Emma how she knew these things when she did not truly understand them herself? How did you explain the vastness of eternity and the emptiness of yearning? How did you explain that you were composed of the transmutable dust that had formed the shape and existence of all that was everything? How could she explain that the nucleus of her inner being had been corrupted millennia gone before, transmuted, reshaped and reborn into forms that even she could not conceive. This energy had not simply sparked in the recent past of this undead life's three hundred years, but was older, much older than that.

This new incarnation was only one transmutation, a cogency of many others that had originally formed unaccountably long ago in the darkness of eternal space. The perpetual hunger for existence could never be sated and in each incarnation the laws that bound it changed. This hunger, in this human existence, was for blood, and blood was the hunger's avatar. Its need festered within her and it was as primordial as creation and beyond time itself. The fresh, warm blood of youth, the magical elixir that kept her 'alive' was a thirst that even Carmilla could only begin to understand if she thought of it in some magical context. Carmilla knew that she had been doomed long ago, in her twenty-third year, but that was when this pestilence had entered her body and corrupted her flesh. She knew too that for most living creatures, the temporal world of anthropological existence must eventually give over to glorious death and dissolution. In her case that death was to be replaced by something other, that even if this mortal semblance should fail, it would be reborn again and to feed again. There could never be the gift of peace granted to her, not now, for she had been chosen. Too, was she forbidden to ever to find love. This truth was not a concept anyone could comprehend for she barely grasped it herself. No one could ever hope to realise her condition. For how the high sun now burned- burned when it had once warmed, destroyed when it had once shone benevolence. Carmilla now found that she had become aberrant to the light of the sun, for the sun's rays scorched her skin if she lingered in the light for too long. The shadows were the best place to linger, and the narrow and dark confines of the coffin was the safest of all places to hide during the day. Carmilla found that there was a strange security in the cold vacuity of the grave.

Emma glanced skyward, looking to the sun. For a moment, she thought Carmilla must be going mad, it was after all only the sun! It rose every day and set every night. It never changed and it shone golden and it purified. She squinted against its glare. Emma shook her head slightly and shrugged. It was foolish to deny the sun's balm, and she did not care that the brightness made her shield her gaze, for the star's light tingled upon her skin and cast about her an aureate halo. The cosiness made her feel happy and she would have liked nothing better than to lie down and rest as the sunlight poured over her like syrup. Waiting quietly for the words that must now surely follow, Emma knew that Carmilla would deliver another weird lecture, the gist of which would be far beyond the capacity of her young mind to grasp. Carmilla spoke always as if she knew things that others could never know, as if she had lived for a long, long time and had become weary of the world. Either that or her imagination was active. Did they not say that if you spent too much time in the sun you would go mad? Well, what if you contrarily spent no time in the sun at all?

'If you stand for too long in the sun's undiluted beams a dreadful sickness will befall you,' Carmilla warned, once again articulating the self-same thing that Emma was thinking. The girl was uncanny. 'Nonetheless, it also has the power to stimulate defence against other sicknesses.' Carmilla seemed in deadly earnest as she spoke to Emma. 'It is a paradox, a riddle that none can understand.' Emma sighed and did not interrupt. She had discovered that it was best to let the beautiful stranger ramble on, for ultimately, she never made much sense, and it did not really matter. The beautiful Carmilla attested to her wild facts. She declared that the enigma of the sun had oft played out in the flesh that rotted on the bones of the peasants who worked the long days in the fields of her father's estates. She had seen with her own eyes the dreadful sores that sprang up upon their skins and the rapid dissolution of their flesh that followed. The effects were so horrible that it was only the courageous that could look upon their faces, and the dedicated that could tend to their festering wounds. The sun was responsible for that, reprobate that it was, burning like a bright coin in the sky pretending benevolence but burning as a furnace of death and agony all the same. Picking up on the tiny sliver of information that her companion had unconsciously offered for the second time in the space of a few short days, that the girl must have come from breeding, Emma abruptly posed another question.

'Your father's estates? Then your family owns land? In which province, Carmilla?'

Carmilla ignored her companion and fell silent. When finally, she spoke, she remarked that she had once been sick, sick almost to the point of death, and although it was so long ago, she could clearly remember every detail so vividly. The illness had come with a miasma in the airs and it had taken hold in her lungs so that breathing had been difficult. Emma looked horrified at this new revelation and asked if Carmilla had been a child in her sickness. The girl merely gave a slight negative nod and did not extrapolate. With the infection she said, had come the coughing, and when she had coughed there was blood, blood upon the lace of her dress during the day and blood upon the lace of her pillow at night. She had suffered the most dreadful and agonising struggle for breath, and there had been sweats as the consumption ate away at the insides of her body.

'Oh, Carmilla, what a terrible story,' said Emma, positively horrified. 'Thank the Lord you did not die!'

'No,' returned Carmilla, 'yet shall I not thank your Lord. How I wish that he had let me die!'

'You should not say such things!' Emma exclaimed, giving a shudder and gripping her romance novel so hard that her knuckles turned white. To hear this new declaration was tantamount to blasphemy, for Emma believed in the Christian faith and in God. Emma could not suppress the look of shock in her pale face. There had been many times when she herself had wished for the succour of death, yet even in that she was glad that she was still alive.

'Why?' asked Carmilla. 'Am I to be struck by lightning?'

'Carmilla,' Emma responded, 'perhaps it is courting ill luck if you talk so.'

'Do not be offended, but my family have different ways to yours regarding religion. We believe in the power of belief, certainly, but Christianity to us is a curse. We rejected its hypocrisy a long time ago. Do not press me, for I cannot explain, it would be pointless to try. Regardless of that, in my illness my father called for the physician, and the physician told my father that he had heard of a strange but certain cure, one that he proposed would surely save me. My father promised him that if I were not cured he would have him whipped like a dog and his parts hung upon staves about the city. The physician told my father that had learned this cure from the works of an ancient theosophist, that the sun was able to convey its healing atoms into the physical body. Thus, he had me placed in the sunlight, hour after hour and day after day, to convalesce, until the cough and the blood dried up and my skin became the shade of amber. By the sun's vital element, the fever burned itself from my flesh and I at length began to recover. He saved his own skin. Is it no wonder to you that I prefer to sit in the shadows now and cannot tolerate the daylight?'

'Oh,' was all that Emma could say, shocked as she was by the abrupt confession and reeling from the wildness of her friend's vehement rejection of the light and the strange contradictions regarding her religious life. Emma retreated silently into passive confusion, wondering at what age Carmilla had fallen to this sickness. She must have been quite young because her skin was like porcelain and bore no present trace of exposure to the light of the sun, no blotches, no amber tan and no freckles. Upon the end of her statement Carmilla retreated into silence and a few moments passed in which both said nothing at all. During this space, the roses quivered in a gentle breeze among the mottled shadows, ivy covered the lattices and within the arbour was cooler than were the open steps. The day had now passed the hour of two and soon the sun would begin its descent and the moon would once again bloom silver in the night. In the shades the two women remained, watching each other but not venturing more talk. Emma did not know what to say so she opened her book and tried to read. It was no good, for Carmilla's words had stirred so many questions that she knew would never be answered had she the courage now to ask. Instead she closed her eyes again and Carmilla watched her from the bench. Breathing slowly and upon the lip of torpor., Emma began humming a broken melody as her mind at length drifted somewhere far away.

The sunlight, Carmilla's foe, was not unfriendly to Emma. It flowed like honey through her chestnut locks; it sparked tiny little fires along the length of her lashes and made her lips glisten pinkly. It was a shame that a young man like Ebhardt was not here to lie at length near her feet, to look up into her sun-kissed face and marvel at her beauty. He might have been her Phoebus sheathing the bright tips of his arrows, ready to pierce her heart. Her mind began to mould an opinion upon imaginary love, conjuring a thrilling recollection of the 'Turk'. Emma felt her cheeks blush. There had been no need for such an intrusive thought but it had come nonetheless, like the thoughts always came now, uninvited and intrusive, emerging out of the oubliette of Carmilla's talk, like an ominous stain, but alluring and dangerous. Part of Emma wished that she had never discovered that book.

'It is beautiful and peaceful here and I should be happy,' Emma thought to herself, trying to divert the rising tide of pulchritude and the fear it inspired, 'but why does my heart yearn so?' Under the lattice with its over-mantle of compound leaves and prickly stems the afternoon seemed to slip by as a dream slips by. Time's shadow tripped lazily over the face of the sundial and Emma ceased humming and almost drifted into sleep, and Carmilla sighed. The auburn-haired beauty opened her own volume with its gilded edges and rested it in her lap among the folds of her dress. With a careless flick, she skimmed through the pages, reading a fragment here and a verse there. She read a line of poetry by some anonymous and long forgotten poet:

'How could I know my heart would fall,

Come down like autumn's leaves must fall

And rot beyond the graveyard wall?'

Carmilla pondered the words, wondering about her own heart and how she wanted Emma to love her, but she was fatalistic for such love seemed impracticable. A breath of wind began to ruffle the tissue thin pages but Carmilla held them down and tried to read more. She kept thinking about Emma's blood, about that one and glorious ruby spot upon her pretty carmine lips. Unable to concentrate Carmilla found that the sentences in her book seemed to be floating off the pages into empty space. The world began to spin. Her slim fingers became inflexible and she was unable to turn the page. She turned her gaze upon Emma, and she wanted so much to reach over and kiss her companion. A shrivelled bloom fell from a withering stem, spilling ashen petals into the open tome. The desiccated flower broke Carmilla's spell and with a blink and a suppressed groan she managed to close the book and set it down on the bench. She thought about Emma until her head ached, and a grey cloud blew in from the nothing to momentarily obscure the sun. Carmilla, not moving, not even to smile, barely breathing, closed her eyes and they were filled with dark light. She wished that the world could go away and leave her be, that she not be chained to forever and unable to truly die. Carmilla shivered and the cloud drew back, and the young woman wondered if time itself meant anything anymore. Time seemed nothing more than an abstraction between two points, two moments in an awful existence. In one moment, you gained and in the other you lost. Something nonetheless was coming, something dreadful and terrible, she sensed it, she preceded it even and the terrible paradox was that she knew that it was the destruction of this fleshy coil that must catch her. Yet those who wanted to destroy her were ignorant of the truth, that whatever parasite infested her core, it could never be destroyed. No matter what, it would come again, and whatever force was approaching to assail her, it was ill prepared to challenge with its patriarchal hatred the core of her existence. They pretended causes concerning the living, because the Devil, they averred, caused the corpses of women to rise from the grave and to seduce and defile. Carmilla sensed the ravenous and dangerous subversion that men tried to bring upon her world, but regardless they knew nothing of the true creature that inhabited her skin. General Spielsdorf was no fool and Mr. Morton only pretended to be one. Although they could never hope to understand the creature that she was they were starved in their souls, tortured with sensual lusts, and once they thought they had unravelled her secret they would seek her 'death'.

Though not just yet, for Carmilla also understood that her power could change the short lives of these violent men beyond all worldly measure, and that their fates could not be revoked, but neither could her own. In this truth, she would reach a point of exaltation that would ultimately lead to another point, one of rebirth, of continuance and then again to melancholy. This fact proved a strange paradox, the carousel upon which her undead flesh was granted spinning eternally, always resurrecting long after these feeble human creatures had turned into dust. In this incarnation, the rules were predicated upon faith, and faith dictated that one must be versed in the 'art' to manipulate the magic, but the magic too came with a cost. That the Christian faith itself was asservate to magical practice eluded these fools. Their own God was vampire, having risen from the crypt. Did they not drink his blood in ceremony, and eat his flesh? Their faith was warped by this peculiar manducation, but that belief was no different to the being that was she, Carmilla. Religion twisted everything. Faith preached of remedies against the revenant, of the efficacy of amulets and charms. That stupid, foolish hunchback and his stinking aromatics was only part of the feeble joke of religion. In this 'life' it caused her to despise and revile the most mundane of religious artifacts like the bauble of a crucifix. Though it was the faith that mattered, not the object itself; it was faith that gave the object its power. Thus, the crucifix itself played host to the spirit of the Christian god, and that god demanded a belief in an adversary power of evil. The Devil walked among the living in the guise of living-dead female flesh. Twisted and rearranged in her most recent reincarnation from death, and having sublimated over three hundred years of Christian superstition, she found that her body could no longer sleep in hallowed ground, that the golden light sparking off the crucifix that had tortured the Sun God 'Christ' hurt her eyes and seared her flesh. The chant of a hymn was a heresy to her ears. There was an awful agony spiked in her brain when the mantra was sung, a magic that reminded the exorcised fiend that it could never enter heaven. Echoing in her ears, Carmilla heard the chant and she heard the bells. They rang as if prophesising her own tragedy of life and her ultimate denial of entry into paradise. She hated the sound of bells, ringing out their fatal proclamation of doom and mocking the dead on the way to the grave.

'Look!' exclaimed Emma, pointing in the direction of the road. They heard the chant of a prayer sung in Latin accompanied by the clanging of the bell. The sound of the bell brought Emma's terrible dream back into her mind, and she bit down nervously on her lower lip. A priest was leading a funeral procession, clad from head to foot in a robe of white and reading aloud a rite from an open bible that he held. Behind him walked two little boys, one carrying censers of smoking incense and the other carrying a stave tipped by a gleaming brass cross. Beyond them another priest walked, similarly attired; it was he who was tolling the bell. A farmer led a great brown horse by the reins and the horse led a wagon upon which was a pine coffin. Apart from a garland of wild flowers that wreathed the length of the box, the coffin was rudely fashioned and unadorned, and it had no handles and bore no inscription. Four older women and two men followed behind the cart. All were dressed in mourning garb, the women in black veils, the men in sombre coats and breeches. Emma stood up and began to descend the three shallow steps from the arbour; her hands wrung together, her eyes upon the point of tears.

'No, don't,' Carmilla told her, standing up herself and swaying on her feet, cautioning her companion to be still. 'Do not go before that ghastly procession! Bad luck will be your lot if you precede a funeral cortège!'

Emma looked back at her companion, bewildered, her light step hesitating, but what did she know of ill-omens? Carmilla was being contradictory yet again. Emma looked to the wagon and the coffin; and saw the pretty garlands of pure white asters; the same buds were threaded into the combed and plaited mane of the drawing horse. Little tintinabulae tinkled in its traces.

'The sound of those bells will herald the fiend who drags you to your death,' said Carmilla angrily and she shuddered as she said the words. Emma was frightened, but she could not know what Carmilla meant, that she herself as the fiend who must drag the living into hell. The beautiful girl screwed up her face in anger. Her love for Emma was a violent bind and the bells only caused her to feel more deeply the agony of amour, for did not bells ring upon your wedding day? 'That priest, he should know better!' Carmilla ejaculated vehemently. 'Nothing but ill comes of such blasphemy! He should know that he must not meet the coffin till it passes into the graveyard!'

Emma stood aghast and the bell continued to ring solemnly, to ask the living to pray for the departed spirit and to vex the demon who had beset the living with its vile curse. The chime was pure and it would protect the soul on its journey to heaven. Torn between the spectacle of the funeral and her friend's lack of empathy and calm, Emma felt a strange pain in her heart. She did not know how to express her sorrow or how to make Carmilla understand that these deaths, but for the grace of God, were not of their own kin and that they still happily remained among their living families. Perhaps they should be grateful. Emma listened to the ring of the bell, and every clang sent a terrible shudder through her companion.

'I should say a prayer,' Emma said and the pretty girl's words were edged with sadness as they left her tongue.

'Why bother!' spat Carmilla vehemently. 'That awful cacophony will continue all the way to the lychgate, until that coffin is received into the churchyard! No doubt the noise will wake the dead from their graves!' Emma almost sobbed as she looked to her friend.

'Say as many prayers as you wish, they won't help!' Carmilla's expression dropped and her face paled a shade whiter as if all the blood in her veins had drained away within the space of a second. Inside her head the chanting had become increasingly loud, wavering in its pitch and reverberating as does an echo volleyed in a mountain high canyon. The distortion hurt her ears and it grew louder and higher until its noise was a scramble of jargon stabbing away painfully at her senses. A harsh light speared from the sun, as sharp as blades glancing off the crux immissa that the little boy held high. The image hurt Carmilla's eyes and even to look upon it was a scourge. No one knew better than she of the truth of the symbol behind the cross, that it was a reminder of a torture reserved for criminals, for impalement. Why, they held you down and thrust the narrow spike into your lower opening and if you were unfortunate the slivered point of the stave missed your vital organs as it punctured through your body to emerge bloodied from your gaping mouth. In unnamable agony, you could twitch for days, until you shook one last time and expired. Unable to penetrate the purpose of the divine mysteries because they aligned with torture only caused Carmilla to be saddened rather than empowered, for in this contradictory twilight half-life she was denied the graces of love and the surety of an end to all pain and suffering. That is what their religion promised them, but that same belief damned her as other and condemned her unto immortal misery. For Carmilla there could be no exaltation in the Cross.

'Da, quaesumus Dominus, ut in hora mortis nostrae Sacramentis refecti et culpis omnibus expiate…'

The priest sang on, sang louder, a chanted requiem that soon swelled into a parody, a dreadful liturgical falsehood that made Carmilla want to scream.

'In sinum misericordiae taupe let suscipi mereamur. Per Christum Dominos nostrum…'

The words assaulted Carmilla like a malediction, a conjuration that tore apart the edifice of the mind. Deafening and shriller became the oratory as it flowed out of the priest's mouth as does excrement flow from a cloaca, his hymn almost ear-splitting and offending Carmilla in her renunciation of the Christian God. There was no prayer that would guide nor protect her as she shuddered betwixt this world and the world of the dark.

'Stop it! Stop it!' Carmilla shrieked, holding up her palms to her ears and plugging them futilely with her fingertips, her entire frame shaking violently. Her bosom heaved as she gasped for breath, and she set her jaw into a rictus so that a curse should not pass from her lips.

'Carmilla, what is it?' cried Emma in distress, riveted by the violence of her friend's reaction to the funeral.

'Nothing, only that dreadful noise!'

'The funeral... but it's the woodsman's daughter!' Emma looked back in sorrow as the funeral procession passed at length along the road.

'I hate funerals!' shrieked Carmilla hysterically. 'Hate them!' As she uttered these passionate words Carmilla spun around and threw herself violently down upon the bench. Somewhere in the dark of her memory she beheld herself awaking within the rigid confines of the tomb. Her whole body quaked in a paroxysm of nervous affliction. She turned her face from Emma.

'I thought it rather sad,' Emma answered back, 'and yet beautiful.' She sat down on the bench beside her friend and took hold of the girl's trembling hand. Yet even with her gentle and compassionate touch she could not reassure Carmilla.

'Since when is death ever beautiful?' Carmilla spat out the words reproachfully as she turned and glared at her companion, and as she did so a flood of crystal tears spilled from her blue, blue eyes. 'Why, you must die, everybody must die, and all are happier when they do!' Carmilla seemed possessed by a discarnate entity, her awful declaration causing Emma to defensively counter that the woodman's daughter had died so young, as if the heartless Reaper should make exemptions for youth. Yet had not her friend Laura been young too? A little frisson rippled over Emma's skin. She was aware of it again, that ambiguous and abstract impression that Carmilla was more devoted to her than ever, devoted like a lover is devoted, like one who is facing the ghastly inevitability of loss. The feeling made Emma sick in her stomach for she did not like it when Carmilla flew into one of these distracted moods.

'There has been so much tragedy in the village recently,' Emma offered by way of explanation and consolation, for a funeral must inevitably follow a death. Vacantly the girl stared off after the procession, and the chanting became distant and faded into the ether, and the mourners became as shadows and they vanished into the autumnal woods. The distortion of sound had at last ebbed away and no longer rang with the bell in Carmilla's ear. The auditory world began to right itself, to become less painful.

'The blacksmith's young wife died only last week,' Emma droned on, unheeding the pain and the visible distress that had knotted up Carmilla's splendid features. The girl was sobbing uncontrollably in stricken emotion. Carmilla felt alone in the dark, for how could she make Emma feel what she was feeling? There was no way to tell her friend that she, Carmilla, could never die, unlike that girl, that woodman's daughter who had now passed enviously beyond the veil of sleep. That girl was spared an eternity of agony, and thus she had no need for the pursuit of love. Carmilla groaned within, ached in a dark place where there was no soul to watch for eternity as all the people she encountered withered and died. She was to be judged as a monster who was callous and unfeeling, who existed by instinct alone, as one who could never love, and she was weary of it all.

'My father said…' Emma stopped before she could finish the sentence for her friend had begun weeping inconsolably. She bit down on her bottom lip to repent any further insensitivity that should leak from her mouth. 'Oh, you really are upset, Carmilla, and I've been saying all these foolish things. Come on, let's go home.' Emma felt emotionally exhausted and in her confusion, realised her friend's anguish all too late and stood up, and with her hand still clasping Carmilla's, she stepped forward. Carmilla held Emma back, and would not get up. She looked pitiful and utterly shaken and Emma could not understand why her friend was so upset. The mystery that was Carmilla only deepened and it further roiled the tumult of Emma's own anxieties. She felt a little dizzy and nauseous, almost unable to deal with the other girl's emotive sensitivities, feeling weak and sick as she was, having foolishly thought that a walk in the afternoon sun might have done her the world of good. Instead it had all turned out badly, with her own strength ebbing and Carmilla emotionally upset. Carmilla shook her head and would not rise no matter how Emma coaxed. The beautiful stranger set her lips into a hard but trembling line as the tears continued to spill down her cheek, her hair fell in an auburn cascade over her shoulder, her bosom rose and fell sharply.

'Carmilla…' Emma spoke softly, encouragingly, and her companion at last stood up but was a rigid as a plank of oak.

'Hold me,' Carmilla said brokenly, 'I beg you, hold me tight!' As she cried she pressed her body into Emma's, her cheek hard against the other's cheek, staining it with wet tears, her bosom soft and yet heavy against her friend's bosom. Emma felt stifled and wanted to squirm away from her companions embrace, but Carmilla clung to her and Emma found her arms involuntarily encircling the girl's waist and she held her for an age unmoving until the last sobs ceased to wrack Carmilla's body and her final tears subsided and dried. Emma herself teetered upon the brink of emotional exhaustion.

Chapter 10

Erotic Nightmares And Tormented Lusts

In which the powers of seduction begin to permeate throughout the Morton household.

Emma was lying in her bed, propped up on her pillows. She had been listening contentedly and had not interrupted as Carmilla read aloud.

'What passion his kisses had awakened in her body and how she wanted him despite the notion that their love was forbidden. With a submissive sigh, she gave herself over to him and he enfolded her in his arms and there was rapture in their wild embrace.' Carmilla closed the book and placed it on the bedside dresser next to the burning lamp, shaking her head as she did so, fluttering her eyelids and sighing. Emma had tried to put the funeral and the scene in the arbour out of her mind but traces of its passionate intensity lingered in her head. Carmilla was so strange and Emma thought that she would never fathom the girl.

'There,' Carmilla said, as if thankful that the shameless romance was done, 'they find love, if not true love.' It occurred to her that on some distasteful level that the silly girl in the story would never be able to know true love. Such romance seemed predicated upon a ridiculous notion, and by that notion the heroine would be bound forever and ever to do a man's bidding. He would betray her- they always did. This imprudence and the finality it suggested, to give up all freedom and thought, confused Carmilla. She hated the idea of being at a man's behest but there was always one somewhere in the shadows, pulling at the marionette strings, some man with his hand up your back. She did not quite understand the vehement hostility of her own her emotions. The romantic dalliance she had just read only distracted and depressed her and she was glad to close its pages and put it aside. It had become something of a tiresome trial to read aloud to Emma another word of it and to pretend with any conviction that she enjoyed the triviality, but she knew her ingénue would beg for another recitation on the following eve and that of course she must concede. Emma blithely refused to comprehend her companion's bored signals.

'Oh, Carmilla, do let's have another chapter. You read so beautifully.' Carmilla placed her hands together in her lap, interlocking her slim fingers as one does when in prayer or contemplation and turned her gaze toward the window.

'Tomorrow,' Carmilla returned, but she wished tomorrow a thousand years away, somewhere in a future that did not include her body or her mind. Abruptly she rose from her chair and walked to the window. It was not the first time that Emma noticed this habit of her new friend, that she would stand by the window and stare out into the night. In fact, it happened almost every night. It had become something of a disturbing mystery of itself, but of course Emma knew that if she asked Carmilla why, the beautiful stranger would evade her question.

'You're not going?' asked Emma, startled by Carmilla's sudden rise, her eyes betraying a wounded disappointment and hurt. For some reason, she did not want to be alone, not just yet, even though Carmilla's cloying devotion repelled her. The funeral of the Woodman's daughter had upset Carmilla quite markedly and Emma was troubled by the girl's strange reaction to the memorial as it had passed them by in the forest. There were things that she wanted to ask her guest, things that might lessen her mystery.

'I must,' was all that Carmilla returned almost coldly, facing the dim glass that threw back her beautiful reflection. The huge teardrop ruby she wore about her neck glinted like fire in the moonlight. Dangling on its golden filament against Carmilla's lily white skin its image in the glass waxed and waned like an ember.

'I'm sorry.' Emma apologised. 'You've read too much... and I've tired you.' Resignedly she knew that she would extract no more information from Carmilla this night.

'Perhaps,' Carmilla spoke as if replying to her own reflection, continuing to stare into the shadows, a little twitch playing about the corners of her perfect mouth.

'I wish I felt tired,' Emma told her, lowering her voice to a barely audible whisper. 'I never do, not at night, just sort of excited.'

'Do you?' asked her intimate friend but the words seemed bored and perfunctory rather than an actual concern. Her eyes were furtively searching in the dark beyond the window glass.

'Yes,' Emma told her, 'and I don't sleep, at least not for ages, and then I feel so wretched and tired during the day.' There was a brief pause in their conversation as Carmilla continued to stare into the dark and did not respond. 'Carmilla, at what do you stare?' A strange shadow passed over Carmilla's smooth brow. 'You always look out of the window. You are scaring me. Is there someone out there?' Carmilla ignored the girl's question with another long and protracted silence that made Emma feel even more uncomfortable. The beautiful girl kept her vigil by the casement and did not look in Emma's direction. When she did finally speak her eyes were sparkling like blue jewels, not that Emma saw, but perhaps there was someone out there in the dark, in the park, watching and waiting. Someone dressed in the garb of a raven, with eyes like fire and teeth like a wolf.

'Dreams come to us from out of the darkness,' said Carmilla, 'but we don't ask them to come.' As she stared beyond the window and into the purple evening, up at the big silver disc of the moon, a visible frisson passed through her body. Emma noted the shudder and her own skin turned to gooseflesh. Carmilla's attention was again given to the night on the other side of the glass. Within the passing of a breath her tone had altered and dropped lower, become strangely mysterious. There was a weird portent in the tenor of her speech. 'The darkness encourages the fanciful.' The sliver of a strange smile creased her mouth. 'Do you dream?'

As Carmilla turned around her eyes were big and glowing.

'You know I do.' Emma's words were quite blunt. She had told Mademoiselle about her nightmares and the Governess had not given the fact much regard. Emma's countenance took on a pained look and she paused, looking to her friend for sympathy. The moon had climbed into a stellar theatre, its glow outlining the shapes of the trees. The sigh of a wind quivered in their branches and the park was a stage upon which the silhouettes of statuary in the garden were posed like mute actors in a weird play. Carmilla watched, turning her head again, scanning the deep darkness, her gaze unwavering. Reclined on her pillows, Emma's doe eyes opened even wider. Carmilla's words had inspired a wonder and a terror that she wished she did not feel.

'The night inspires our dreams to become wild, delirious visions. We sometimes think that they are real,' Carmilla continued almost mindless of her companion, her voice trailing off until it became nothing but a whisper, an almost disembodied echo. 'Although it is possible, that somehow those visions might yet look toward truth and reveal to us our absolute destinies.'

'Our absolute destinies?' repeated Emma, responding in fear, and with a nervous laugh. This talk, as were their conversations generally, was unsettling. 'Then I feel it shall be my destiny to be terrified out of my wits every night! I'm sure I don't know what you mean. I do not choose to dream these things but the nightmares come unbidden, regardless. Destiny is most heartless and cruel.' For a moment Carmilla was silent. When she did eventually speak she made a slight sigh.

'I apologise,' she said to her companion, 'I did not intend for you to be afraid for your fate.'

'My fate! Now I am terrified!'

With a cold dread clutching at her heart, Emma shook her pretty head. She could not understand Carmilla's confused dialogue. Fate implied that one was doomed and that ultimately... She broke off the distressing thought.

'You say the strangest things. I worry about you sometimes, you are so mysterious. I find myself concerned how our fates are entwined, which brings us back to your talk of destiny. I don't know what is to be mine if it is not to be alone. One thing I might ask of Fate, is shall I never find love?'

'What is it that you want to find in love?' Carmilla asked.

Emma sighed reflectively.

'Perhaps I would like to have a suitor like Carl Ebhardt. Or am I too fated like dear Laura and will be similarly denied and doomed?'

'Doomed?' Carmilla responded rather sharply. 'How silly! You talk as if you might die for want of a man to heal some imaginary void in your life.'

'Have you never loved, Carmilla?'

'I cannot say. True love is such an elusive thing. We often get it confused with adoration and exaltation... with infatuation.'

Carmilla did not turn, but her fingers went up to the glass and caressed lightly against Emma's pale and ghost-like reflection.

'I shall go mad in this isolation,' Emma said aloud. 'At home, in England, I could visit friends and spend summer by the seaside. I was so looking forward to Laura's visit. It hardly seems fair that she should have died.'

'You have said as much before,' Carmilla replied dismissively, sounding bored, 'and it only deepens the sadness but it does not help you.'

She gave a vague shrug but still did not turn, nor did she leave the window, absorbed by something beyond the glass, by something she studied out there in the dark.

'The whole world is mad and even madder when it is mad for love,' she said absently, the moonlight sculpting silvery hollows in her cheeks, turning the shadows across her lips to claret. 'The world wants justification, but love has no need to justify itself. If only all our existence were but a dream, then we could dream love real.'

'Your riddles are beyond my ability to unravel,' sighed Emma. 'I can hardly begin to disentangle the meaning of my dreams either. When I told Mademoiselle some of my dreams I'm sure she did not want to listen. She thinks I am being silly and begging for attention. They're horrid dreams and they seem so real, so strange and lifelike, it's frightening.' Emma did not like to think about the dark or the dreams, or the beastly chimera that came in the midnight hour and spread itself warmly over her body. Thoughts of it had begun to plague her mind during her waking hours and would not let her alone. She had begun to flinch whenever she caught a flutter in the corner of her eye, saw the family cat Gustav, and she hated the clouds as they passed over the sun. They reminded her of shapes, uncanny whorls that induced horripilation. The shadows made everything obscure and what she could not see made Emma scared. In her vague and delusionary lassitude, Emma's mind found itself drifting and fixating on the terrible intensity of her nightmares. There was something about the dreams that was repulsive and yet alluring, about the lithe form of the great cat as it paced back and forth across her room, padding, purring, growling... To the young woman it was as much an absurdity as it was a revelation that the fantastic beast should both thrill and terrify her. How did you explain and to whom did you explain that you hated the fever and yet longed for it too? Emma leaned forward and rested on her elbow, as if those few extra centimetres closer to her friend Carmilla would lessen the barrier between them and pull the other girl away from the casement and the night. Finally, with an impassive countenance, as if upon some silent signal, Carmilla turned about.

'Tell me,' she said as she slowly drew toward the bed, her eyes wide with anticipation. She sat down alongside her companion, so close that their skins almost touched.

'I haven't told anyone. Not everything. I can't.'

'Tell me!' Carmilla insisted.

So here Emma found herself upon the dreaded moment of admission, like a penitent at the confessional, how could she tell of the repulsive creature that visited her when she slept or of the corpses that littered the byways of her nightmares? How could she find the words to speak of her dear friend Laura, reassembled in hallucination from the cremated ashes of her corpse, or the hunchback hanging from a rope that proclaimed her own death knell? How could she dare admit the carnal pleasure that the monster cat unleashed, that it brought to her flesh made wanting? Emma hated herself at that moment, and the hate and the interior conflict became evident in her pretty face. With wide eyes, she stared beyond her companion, concentrating just like Carmilla had on the dark beyond the window pane.

'The cat comes,' she began hesitantly, not sure where to begin. Nonetheless, to begin with the beast made one think of its ghastly, suffocating bulk spreading over her bedding, growing bigger and blacker and growling and pricking with its sickle claws. 'It sits at the foot of my bed, staring.' Emma saw the conjuration even as she spoke, she saw its eyes, great big and large as moons, and blue, sapphire blue, each iris narrow slits and golden. Carmilla appeared caught in an intense rapture, listening to Emma's words with awe, raptured with as much fascination as had Emma when listening to the tale of Queen Tera.

'Then it reaches out towards me and I try to scream, but my throat is strangled.' A horrible shudder tingled along Emma's spine and she clutched at her throat as if ice had frozen up her vocal cords. 'It lies across me, warm and heavy, rippling and pressing down, and I feel its fur in my mouth!' The girl gagged at the memory and her hand flew to her lips. She could feel the creature, taste its fur, and she recalled how she could not swallow, for its pelt filled up her throat and choked away her breath.

'In terror, I retch with fear…'

'What happens then?'

Emma Morton stopped for a moment as she arrived upon the point of a ghastly but absolute realisation.

'It turns into you, Carmilla,' she told her companion, and both were amazed and terrified at the revelation.

'Me!' Carmilla exclaimed in amazement and then she laughed at the absurdity.

'Then you embrace me, and kiss me, and suddenly everything is all right and I'm so happy,' Emma gasped, almost relieved that the creature of her nightmares should transform into the most beautiful girl that had ever walked upon the earth. The girl felt the other girl take and squeeze her hand and Emma blushed, but Carmilla only projected concern; she was so demure and soothing and consoling and her presence was a beam of light that radiated gloriously in Emma's stifling and dark place. Yet in professing her love, a love to which Emma knew she could never consciously yield, Carmilla was the calumny at the root of the nightmare.

'Though even as you're holding me close,' Emma continued, her voice dropping lower yet still, as though she were ashamed of what she must confess, almost unable to say what must be said next, 'I feel a pain, sharp as needles, dragging at me.' She raised a finger to her breast and paused in confusion. 'I feel the life running out of me as though my blood were being drawn.' Emma did not want to remember more of the horrific details of the dream, for it always ended the same nasty way. Upon the shrieking scales of a terrible crescendo the nightmares would culminate with the cat biting into her bosom.

'And?'

'I wake and scream,' Emma said weakly, and closed the door on that chapter of the confessional. She did not want to talk about the dreams anymore for it was too distressing.

'Oh, my poor darling,' said Carmilla in absolute sympathy, reaching forward to clasp Emma's heart-shaped face in her hands and looming in close. Like a lover Carmilla pressed Emma's face toward her bosom, to rest upon her shoulder, stroking her hair lightly. 'You know you will always be safe as long as you are with me.' Emma raised her head and gave the beautiful stranger a blank, unflinching look, irresolution in her eyes. She looked like a doll, impassive and with no will of her own, and she tried to move back but found that her strength had all been sapped away, even her thoughts were now drifting and she could barely recognise Carmilla. With delicate and gentle movements Carmilla pressed in closer to Emma and her fingers fluttered down the girl's cheek and over her lips, down her neck and across her shoulders. At Emma's bosom Carmilla's touch stalled and lingered as her fingers undid the button to the girl's nightdress. She pulled the nightdress away and Emma's breasts were revealed, Carmilla cradling the girl's head in its descent to the pillow. Emma was caught in a trance, caught in a paralysed excogitation, and she had no will to beg Carmilla to stop, no voice with which to plead that she did not want the girl to stroke her breasts or to kiss her lips. Carmilla's hair tumbled over her shoulders, a thick and heavy and living mass that fell about Emma's face, smothering and unpleasant. Emma gasped from under the writhing obscenity, groaned with a sick fascination and wanted to cry out, but could not. In the darkness, outside of the window the wind shivered about the house, scattering seared leaves across the park, making them tumble through the cathedral of trees. With the wind came the evil. It was splendid in its dark beauty and it sat astride its black steed. It had eyes that smouldered like coals. Something of the twilight and of the elusive and the unreal coiled in its form. In the subdued light the dark swarmed with silver-grey and indigo, it moulded a chiselled shape from dreams and tormented lusts. Emma sensed its presence in the dark, that it was out there and she began to cry, but Carmilla kissed away her tears and took the kiss lower and lower until quivering it sipped between Emma's parted thighs. Carmilla moved gracefully in the moonlight, up and down, the tide of her hair pulsing and undulating as if it were a nest of snakes. The golden luminance of the bedside lamp threw a glowing aura about her body, and cast her delirious shadow over the wall. Emma could not stem the unwilling wave of passion that came with the stupor, for the dark had hold of her, tightly and irrevocably, and she found herself soaring to the heights of Heaven and then plunging to the depths of Hell. She could refuse neither option.

In Carmilla's touch there was a wonderful heat that brought with it a wet and warm tingling in her nerves. That tingling was electric, galvanic and it spread over the leaping coil of her skin and made a Vulcan furnace of her sex. Carmilla's lips hungrily brushed against Emma's body, burning a trail of live coals, her fingers dancing like a harp player, plucking notes on Orpheus's lyre as the music led her victim down into the Underworld with a song that made the soul quiver. Form outside, in the night, Emma thought she heard the rush of the wind, thought she heard the flapping of great black wings, but it was the storm of the nightmare that churned the shadows of the night into a maelstrom. From the edge of the estate a Dark Angel, a Seraph, sang its own song to the night, sang out a sonnet to the pewter moon, an aria to obsession and possession. The voice told Emma that she needed no young man to break her heart but they were hollow words that she did not want to hear. All she needed, the voice insisted, was the love of this beautiful girl. In her trance Emma could not even blink, though if she could have blinked the spell of binding might have been broken. Opening her big brown eyes wider and wider, Emma convulsed and a torment wracked her body. The dark was a lure and it covered her, covered her breasts and her belly, her thighs and her sex. The night sang its music, played its choral, sweet harmonious music and conjured songs of the corrupted flesh from the absolute depths of the Abyss. Emma writhed in her bed, in a burning erotic fever, holding in muted screams of suffering as if she were suppressing a torrid personal bedlam, and she beheld the light ebb and dip. A spiralling fever washed over her, crushed her will to dust and it was both dulcet and terrible and it filled her with revulsion and longing, and lust's twisting tendrils wrapped every nerve of her body. Her skin was florid and livid, sensitive and hot to the touch. Hell-fire ran through her veins like magma about to erupt from the caldera of a fiery mountain peak. The sound of the blood rushing through her veins was deafening and this nightmare of anticipation plunged life and living into a state of damnation.

Carmilla gave a seductive murmur and raised her head from the creamy valley of Emma's thighs and she smiled. In her smile was conveyed a pledge of all that was gratification and all that was horror. Something was wrong with Carmilla's features, Emma could not see clearly but the girl's visage had become a thing of vapour and sparks, her beauty no longer soft and glorious. Instead there was a nasty, almost cruel hardness in her eyes, and those eyes were changing, swelling, bursting with blue darknesses. Her teeth, gleaming when she smiled, looked sharper, just like the hunchback had declared, and they were pointed like ivory spikes. There was something unholy in her smile, something beyond being human, full of an unnamable ecstasy that whispered of a crawling, spasmodic horror and yet an inexplicable joy. From her mouth, there issued forth a purling growl and then her face turned back again, her tongue flicking into the sweetness that lay beyond the nameless boundaries of dreams. She kissed and kissed and a strange agony began to invade Emma's body, and worse the obscenity brought forth an appetence, a stimulus, a longing. It spread from her sex and fired every nerve, and the girl clutched at her sheets till her knuckles turned white and she passed from apathy to glory in the space of a heartbeat. In that penultimate moment Emma let the darkness sing her down to even darker dreams and as she dreamed her virginal flesh shuddered into orgasm.

In her own apartment Mademoiselle Perrodon sat at her desk composing a letter to Mr. Morton, as she had promised. The lamplight gave the parchment a glowing saffron hue as her quill scratched a trail of midnight ink across the paper.

'Dear Mr. Morton,

As you requested, I am writing to let you know about Emma. For the moment her condition appears stable, some days she seems stronger than others. This even though she often finds herself exhausted should she partake in even the gentlest stimulation of exercise. I encourage Emma with as much influence as I have, but she oft rebukes my care and I am beginning to have concerns that her mental health may be deteriorating.

Our guest, Carmilla tends to Emma devotedly and has become the most caring and affectionate friend during this short time. Emma is thus blessed as Carmilla has been of great boon, but regarding our house guest, there has been no word yet concerning her family's return. Carmilla herself is in ignorance of any proposed date and has expressed anxiety. I fear that if her Aunt does not arrive soon the girl will begin to fret, or worse, and I hardly dare think what should happen if she were to succumb to the strange illness that seems to now afflict Emma.

However, I must return once again to our most paramount worry, Emma. Your daughter has troubled nights and she looks so pale during the day. Perhaps my nervousness is not unfounded for, as you are aware, several village girls have fallen to the unknown malady that is spreading through our local community. There have been deaths in the village lately, the Woodcutter's daughter was buried only yesterday, and although I do not wish an ill portend, Emma might need to see the Doctor.

As the village is a good five kilometres away our slight isolation may be all that is protecting us from infection. In your absence, I have taken the precaution…'

The Governess paused and looked up. She considered that her position in Mr. Morton's absence could only be strengthened if she were to make the correct decision. However, what was the correct decision? Calling in the Doctor had been Morton's own suggestion, but Mademoiselle felt that Emma, like many young girls, was attention seeking. Perhaps it was not a tonic that was called for here but rather a need for Emma to emerge from her deepening hysterias. Mademoiselle had read about the phenomena and had concluded that the condition was caused by mental instability and that if it was left to persist without treatment the situation had the potential for tragedy. With a wry and strangely cynical look that made a twist of her lips, Mademoiselle had thus determined that the time had come for Emma Morton to grow up. Admittedly the girl exasperated her, but that was no wonder when Emma was so vapid as to be annoying. Her dreamy boredom marked Emma's countenance to the point that it was so without character. She seemed so bland, and she had also let her mind drift into apathy. Apathy was not an attitude that Mademoiselle would have wanted any young woman to adopt. If Emma Morton even thought of catching a husband then perhaps it was time for her to take her role as a woman seriously, and learn her languages, her needlepoint and her music. It would do her life no good to wallow in the past and mourn forever, there had to be a point where common sense prevailed. The Governess shook her head. Her thoughts of course were for a practical world, but here in Stiria that world was far, far away. Being far away now found her having to decide what was best for a woman who was not that much younger than herself. Perhaps that was the true crux of the matter, that Emma Morton represented the maidenhood that Mademoiselle Perrodon had yearned for, but through life's turns and changes, had been denied. Despite this unpleasant fact of inner realisation, Mademoiselle decided it was best to shelve such thoughts away into a secret compartment in her mind. It was all but an ugly bafflement that made the Governess wonder why on earth Fate had chosen for her the education of young ladies instead of a diamond tiara.

Mademoiselle Perrodon's nib poised in mid-air and she was about to begin her next sentence when a terrible scream issued forth from Emma's room and resounded through the house. The Governess dropped her quill abruptly, a splotch of black ink spattering over her writing paper, and she swiftly picked it up and placed it back in its well. Catching up her shawl she ran to Emma's room. As the door burst inward Mademoiselle could see little, for the lamp was low and the moon had disappeared behind a phalanx of purple cloud. For one imaginary instant, a moment that was but a flicker of grey shadow, she thought she caught the shape of a great cat disappearing into the darkness under Emma's bed. The illusion sent a painful arrow of shock through her heart and then, as she blinked she again saw only shadows. As her mouth formed an expression of surprise she almost tripped in her step. She quickly reprimanded herself for being so foolish, for there was nothing there. Now Emma's overactive imagination was beginning to play tricks in her own head, and that was not good. The Governess shook herself into reality, for there was no room for phantasms and nightmares in her practical world, and she looked to the distraught girl in her bed. Emma continued to scream in her distress, backing into her pillows as if trying to evade some entity that was not visible, a spectre that only she could see.

'Emma!' Mademoiselle called as she ran up to the bed, turning up the lamp so that the room swelled with even bigger shadows.

'Mademoiselle!' Emma cried out, recognising the Governess in the horror of her delirium. 'It was there!'

The girl pointed to the bottom of the bed but there was no monster to be seen scurrying under the tumult of pearl dyed linen. Beholding Mademoiselle's scepticism, Emma responded in desperation. 'It bit me!' she insisted, and she pulled down her nightdress. Her breast still stung from the infliction and there were two punctures, red and livid as if sharp objects had been driven into Emma's skin. It pained and burned and no one would believe her about the cat. 'Look!' Mademoiselle had to believe her now, for here was the proof. The Governess returned a look of shock once she had glimpsed the wounds. Their edges were raw, as if something had drawn upon them, and there the blood was beginning to coagulate and to scab about the rims. A thin stream of crimson had trickled over the creamy globe of Emma's breast and pooled in a stain at her bodice. A couple of vermillion flecks dotted the sheet. Mademoiselle could hardly believe the truth of it, and yet part of her so wanted Emma to be at fault in her derangement. Was it at all possible that Emma might have gone to the extremes of mutilating herself? It was a much more likely explanation, distasteful as it was for the Governess to contemplate, than the fantasy of a great feral cat that visited in dreams. Emma seemed to be descending into that obsessive and dark place that had caught her mother, and Mademoiselle was somewhat afraid of the decisions she might be forced to make, for Emma's sake. Just as Mademoiselle Perrodon grasped the horror of her own situation, gasping and with her eyes locked on those two red wounds, both she and Emma were startled by a voice that came from behind them and both flinched in terror and looked to the door.

'It was my fault,' said Carmilla. 'It was a brooch I gave her. I told her to be careful.' Carmilla appeared suddenly in the doorway and entered, languid in her movements, shimmering in the lamplight, her lovely body a wave of satin curves beneath the sheer fabric of her nightdress. The rosy buds of her nipples were plainly visible under the flimsy fabric and so was the dark triangle that crowned her pubis. She glided across the room like a gentle wave of mist and Mademoiselle's eyes were full of the young woman's beauty. The girl stepped up to stand before the Governess, and she was close, so close that their bodies almost touched. A ripple of fever crawled like a lizard in Mademoiselle's skin and Carmilla arched her eyebrows, as if knowing the moment; and the ghost of acknowledgement dimpled the corners of her carmine lips.

'No, no!' Emma protested, looking from her friend to her Governess and whimpering. 'It was the cat!' Carmilla stepped around the tutor, and her nightdress, in a swish of silk, brushed against the woman's hips. Mademoiselle suppressed a little gasp and her body quaked. She pulled her shawl up about her shoulders as if she was cold, but indeed it was heat that was coursing through every fibre of her flesh. The Governess wanted to step back, to step away but something held her rooted to the spot. Watching Carmilla as one who is hypnotized watches, she saw the beautiful girl reach out her slender arm and gently stroke Emma's cheek.

'Go to sleep,' Carmilla coaxed with a sweet whisper. 'Everything is all right now,' Carmilla reassured Emma with her touch and leaned forward and kissed her tenderly. 'Go to sleep,' she repeated, and Emma closed her big doe eyes, and with a submissive sigh calmed the terrified pounding of her heart. With Carmilla here the nightmare would not come again, for Carmilla was comfort and in her assurance, there was strength. Carmilla pulled up the covers and folded them over Emma's breast, hiding the twin scars and the trickle of blood. Then she stood tall and looked down. There was no expression in Carmilla's face, not a line, not a shadow, only her crystalline blue eyes sparkling like frozen stars. Carmilla turned to Mademoiselle Perrodon.

'I have one too,' she said, and she held up a brooch of apatite and green garnet set in gold. The jewelled fastener glinted with cold fire in the lamplight. 'Do you see how sharp the pins are?' The girl ran the tips of her fingers over the sharp little prongs.

'Oh, yes,' Mademoiselle returned, marvelling at the blazing stones, marvelling at her own heated desires. She felt that she must get away for the atmosphere had become quite cloying, and she remembered that evening some night's past when Carmilla had kissed her cheek in the hallway outside of Emma's room. She had been riveted then, nailed to the spot just as she was now. The only movement she could make was to gently nod her head and Carmilla smiled.

'Let me give it to you,' she said, holding up the jewelled brooch. Its facetted surface was dazzled with light, and Carmilla presented it to the Governess.

'Oh, no, please,' the woman protested, shaking her head in the negative, 'I couldn't.'

Yet in her weak refusal there was submission, and Carmilla pressed her advantage and quietly insisted.

'Please, I want you to have it.' The girl moved in closer and Mademoiselle's skin began to leap in fervid anticipation. Before Mademoiselle Perrodon could voice another protestation, Carmilla pinned the brooch in the middle of the valley of the Governess's bodice, fastening the shawl with its prickly little fangs, the tips grazing her leaping skin underneath the material. Both of her hands inched slowly, inexorably over the Governess's bosom, her fingers fluttering as gossamer wings might flutter, lightly touching, lingering, and pressing. Mademoiselle Perrodon felt her cheeks go rosy and she could only watch those fingers as they touched and softly caressed, inched downward in unhurried slow motion. In a flash of heat the woman's nipples became erect and the urge to clasp Carmilla's hand and hold it firm upon her breast was born of such intensity as to cause Mademoiselle a visible frisson. Carmilla's smile only deepened, and her blue eyes flashed with lamp-lit scintillates as her hands left Mademoiselle's bosom and passed over her arm and below. Those velvet fingertips traversed the tutor's belly and her hips, trailing fire over the thin, cotton of the woman's chemise. Mademoiselle gasped. As she gasped she looked up and met Carmilla's eyes. Mademoiselle understood the girl's look, understood the nature of the unspoken invitation and her response was something that she could not repress. Nor did she wish to deny it any longer. Carmilla broke the lock of their gaze and glanced across her shoulder toward the bed. Emma had settled now and appeared to have fallen into sleep.

'She will be quiet now,' Carmilla told the Governess, and she stepped lithely around the older woman and slid toward the bedroom door and floated through into the corridor. Mademoiselle Perrodon followed the younger girl with her eyes but she saw only a niveous taper of white silk that drifted as if in air, drifted as mist drifts in the occluded shadows of the eve. The Governess followed and Carmilla closed the door and then, after a moment in which Mademoiselle's bosom rose and fell so rapidly that she felt her heart must burst; she followed, like a lamb, to her own bedroom door. That door stood open and Carmilla paused in its frame, hovering, extending her offer with only a look, and the Governess came forth, her mind captured, her desires catching fire. The woman moved towards Carmilla, slowly, hesitantly, breathing deeply, excitedly. Once both women were inside the bedchamber, the beautiful stranger locked the door. She walked into the room and glanced to the Governess's writing desk. There she paused for a moment, looking down at the unfinished letter addressed to Mr. Morton.

Carmilla smiled secretively and she crossed to the open window. A light breeze danced in the curtains and lifted the page with the copperplate script, shuffling it on the desktop. The curtains danced a tumbling revolution in the air and for one moment Carmilla looked down into the park and out beyond the lace and into the night. Far up in the vault empyrean was a great silver moon and thin veils of cloud drifted above the tree line, black on indigo blue. Above the clouds there glimmered a sprinkling of stars. A rider on horseback waited sentinel in the shadows in the trees, motionless and all over black save for the two points of flame that were his eyes. Carmilla nodded imperceptibly as if upon some command and turned away and glanced back to face the Governess. Her lips glistened ruby red in the moonlight, and she spoke.

'Turn down the lamp,' said Carmilla, confident in her authority and uttering no further crippled conversation or innocuous triviality. Mademoiselle Perrodon obeyed and the light dimmed into murky shadows. Within her flesh she knew now something that had awakened, something that had been for so long sleeping dormant in the Underworld, something that yearned for the warmth of this other woman. She understood something else at this moment too, the truth as to why she had never married, the truth that her desires were for the silken skin of female lovers and not for the coarse flesh of men. Here then was the moment of truth, a truth born of erotic nightmares and tormented lusts. Carmilla began to undo the silken buttons of her nightdress. When they were all undone she slipped the garment down her torso and over her hips and it pooled in the pewter moonlight at her feet. Her naked breasts stood high, their centres the closed buds of roses tinged erubescent against the creamy skin. That skin seemed to glow in the dark as if the girl were sculpted from a single block of pure white marble. Carmilla did not step from her gown but remained before the window, a silhouette in the frame, darkly visible to the night, her form etched in a silver halo cast in the light of the moon. With a slight movement of her hand she invited Mademoiselle Perrodon to come to her. Breathless the Governess gazed upon the girl's beauty, looked with thirst upon those breasts and those hips, upon the tangle of fine down at her thighs, at the radiance that spilled from her core.

The Governess came forth and stood before the younger beauty. Carmilla reached out and caressed the woman's face and then unpinned the brooch from her bosom, its sharp little prongs lightly grazed over the soft skin of her breast. The Governess's shawl drifted to the carpet. The girl leaned closer and her lips alighted upon Mademoiselle's lips and she kissed her, using her tongue to explore Mademoiselle's mouth. The Governess shuddered and returned the kiss fervidly, aflame with a new and unquenchable passion that would not be denied. Carmilla led her new conquest towards the bed and the dark shadows of the room engulfed them, swallowed the two women whole. The two shapes became as one, melded at the lips, at the stroke of the hand, as bosom coerced bosom, and the beautiful stranger was inside Mademoiselle's head. Her commands were gentle and yet at the same time carnal, her hands had slipped beneath Mademoiselle's nightdress and her touch was intimate and searing. A burning range of sensations stirred through Mademoiselle's blood and she quivered with an insane appetence, and Carmilla's fingers began exploring her body as it had never been explored before. Rapture then was an entity that sang a wondrous song, an all persuasive cadence in her ear, and the song flowed sweetly into Mademoiselle's mouth, into her mind, seeped into the pores of her skin, into her soul. She almost fainted, for the rush of sensuality had made her all but weak, and it had become damp and torrid between her thighs as Carmilla pressed her slim fingers against her sex. The caress obliterated everything within Mademoiselle Perrodon's flesh that was not born of longing, and the old flesh, the redundant vellum was cast off like a mantle of grey dust. On the writing desk, the sheets of thin white paper addressed to Mr. Morton turned brittle and descended into ashes. The ashes were lifted into the wind.

Ever watchful, outside in the park, the man in black sat tall in his saddle and he laughed silently, his fangs glinting as silver daggers in the shafts of cold moonlight.

Mademoiselle had spent her night in the dual embraces of both pleasure and guilt. She feared many things when the morning sunlight beamed through her bedroom window, feared irrational and shamed thoughts. Why was it that whenever you felt good you were made to feel bad? Life laced its sweets with poison. Mademoiselle did not like the fact that after her submission she had awoken to anxiety. How could life have brought her thus far only then to scramble her head now with lust and self-reproach? These thoughts brought on a peculiarly lethargic inertia that almost mirrored Emma Morton's own indolence and nearly threatened to confine her to her room. Despite this Mademoiselle forced herself to dress and went downstairs to breakfast. She had to face the world and the household and her duty, and she had to speak with Carmilla. The conservatory was deserted and silent when she entered, and so alone she sat down for breakfast. One woke up alone, one breakfasted alone, one lived alone. Were things really any worse than they had been before she had arrived in this wretched country? Emma was still in bed and Carmilla never emerged until well after noon, but Mademoiselle thought she might go to her and... How she wanted so much to be with Carmilla, to be close to the beautiful girl, to hold her and to kiss her, how she craved her touch, her kisses, her hair, her body entwined about her own. Nonetheless, thinking such distractions only made her feel more nervous and upset. Seated at the table, Mademoiselle did not look out into the garden, for in this new state of feeling she felt wholly unable to appreciate that the sun was shining. Besides, the sun was too bright for her, it hurt her eyes... Everything should have been bright and fresh and pretty but it wasn't, for a pall had now somehow fallen over the Morton house and she had been gathered up and smothered in its folds. Renton served her breakfast and bowed mockingly as he did so, smiling like a jester and giving the impression that he was the holder of a secret and dangerous knowledge.

'Miss Emma?' Renton asked, his eyebrows arching.

'Miss Emma, what?' returned Mademoiselle, not looking at the beast.

'Shall I have cook prepare her a tray?'

The man seemed to be playing with the Governess, challenging her position, waiting for her to say something counter and slip up so that he could curry favour with Mr. Morton. How she despised him.

'She is not awake yet,' Mademoiselle said irritably. 'I will look in on her soon.'

'Yes, Miss,' Renton replied as the Governess reached out and took a slice of warm toast from the rack.

'Honey?' Renton asked, and he protracted the word as he leered into Mademoiselle's face. She only glared back. A couple of sticky jams and a pot of honey were placed before her and Mademoiselle felt as if her stomach were going to churn. How did you make herself eat with him standing over you? Thankfully Renton excused himself and disappeared through the galley door. She was glad when he had gone. He was the fly that spoiled the sweet, buzzing around objectionably, always looking and ogling and almost always upon the point of salivating. Renton. Now there was a man who thought himself way above his station. He did not like Mademoiselle Perrodon as much as she disliked him and that had been so from the first day she had come to this house. Why and what it was that she had committed to irk the man so was a mystery, but regardless, she was not going to let him destroy her position. When she and Renton shared the same space, which happened often in this old mansion, they generally exchanged suppressed sneers and disconnected strands of officious dialogue. The man was somehow able to infuriate her ire without effort and sometimes got close to putting a match to the kindling that fuelled her emotions. In truth Renton quite repelled her with his leering mouth and his belittling sarcasms. Often enough she had caught him groping at the housemaids. He was not in any form or fashion an attractive man, quite the opposite, but what he lacked in visual beauty he compensated for with slyness. It made Mademoiselle ill in her stomach to think about the man, and the way he looked at the women in the house, his eyes hungry, his hands roaming whenever they got the chance. She had noted how Gretchin squirmed when he was near. If she could have her way, Mademoiselle would have had Renton replaced months ago, and she vowed to speak with Mr. Morton upon his return from Vienna regarding this issue. Renton had to go! She shook her head and sighed. The sigh was one of only half regret, for despite the awful butler there was Carmilla, and she had been the most exciting experience of the flesh that Mademoiselle could ever have dreamed would happen in her life.

With a limp movement, she broke the toast in two and tried to take a bite, but thoughts of Carmilla again wormed their way into her skull. She understood all too well that her new amour would soon leave when her family returned and that this life would have to go on unfulfilled. Worse was the terror that her secret love should be discovered. Surely, she would be dismissed if that were to happen. She speculated for a wild moment in which she absconded with Carmilla and that they fled to the beautiful stranger's far and distant country, wherever that may be. However, the dream dissipated as rapidly as it had blossomed. If anyone should catch on, suspect her sin, then what would happen to her?

Mademoiselle understood that the truth would spell her doom, for she could never find another position or could she ever return to her family. The worry that Renton should be the agency by which that knowledge might occur was beyond any humiliation she could imagine. If the leering creature's tongue did not speak the words that had you immediately fired then he would surely find other uses for that tongue during the most distasteful blackmail imaginable. Mademoiselle shuddered in disgust and did not think for a minute that Mr. Morton would advocate the employment of a tutor who loved another woman. Where would that leave his adolescent daughter if not the in the path of a deviant? The Governess could not fathom why it felt bad to feel good. As that question raised its ugly head she heard a clopping of hoofs in the gravel. A horseman was arriving, and curious that it might be a post rider from Vienna, Mademoiselle threw down her napkin and toast and pushed back her chair. Looking from the conservatory the Governess saw that it was young Ebhardt who jumped down from his mount, passing the bridle to a stable boy. She watched him and her eyes narrowed, like a cat's.

Ebhardt was glad to dismount for he had been riding all morning, through the many kilometres of forested dips and rises that separated the Spielsdorf estate from this house. Glancing about the portico he noted the strange phenomena of the withering ivy that clung about the building in brown festoons. Perhaps a particularly cold spell had caused the blight. It was certainly odd, but he dismissed the deliberation because right now he had other things to worry about. This little sojourn was consuming time that he really could not spare, for there were a hundred things to manage at the General's estate and his not controlling those things left his mind open to drift into unwanted reflection about the direction of his life. Since Laura had died Ebhardt's head had been shriven with indecision. The General had gone away to Moravia and there was still no word about his return and when he did come back Carl wasn't hopeful of a happy outcome to their tangled domestic situation. The young man had become tired of the endless search for succour, both for his pocket and for his heart and he had begun to hate the moral guilt that was now chewing on his insides. Strange that he had never felt such emotions before, probably because as he reasoned his situation had never been played out in a domicile but rather in service. Yet it was still service whichever way you looked at the circumstances and he had no real power at all in any of it whatsoever.

That was what frustrated and vexed his life. Perhaps he had made a gigantic mistake and now it would be almost impossible to undo. The thought weighed heavy on his mind and thus he preferred to be working. At least when he was working it was almost like some parlay had been reached, one wherein neither party really wanted truth or absolution. The thoughts could be deflected and shelved and life still went on, but for how long nobody knew for sure. It had been intimated that the General's business away would bring with it bad tidings upon his return, but he had not even confided in Ebhardt the reason for his journey save that he was going to visit an old army friend, the Baron Hartog. Everybody waited for the General's reappearance in suspense. There were other matters that worried Ebhardt too, for recently there had been several deaths in the province, mostly young women. After Laura had died, Birgit, a serving girl from the neighbouring Bullheimer estate had gone missing and Conrad, the General's personal valet had been questioned about her disappearance. It would do nobody's reputation any good to have any further scandal attached to the estate and therefore Carl's own indiscretions needed to be wrapped up and buried. Ebhardt walked swiftly up to the front door and knocked. He waited for a short while as Mademoiselle came through from the conservatory and into the main hall. She opened the door and her expression hardened. Ebhardt was another man whose company she did not wish to entertain. Oh yes, he was handsome, blindingly handsome, but those Dionysian charms could not work their magic upon her, she saw straight through that beautiful face and resented his intrusion immediately.

'Good morning, Mr. Ebhardt.'

'Good morning, Mademoiselle.'

They exchanged superfluous greetings as if each were poised opposite the other upon the cracking fissure of a frozen lake. There was no reason for the tension, but it was there nonetheless. Ebhardt had no cause to dislike the Governess, for he hardly knew her, but the aura she radiated at this moment could hardly be termed friendly, and he felt her anger and her distrust. The attitude sparked his curiosity. People generally only got their back up so fast when they had something to hide. There followed an awkward moment of silence. Ebhardt straightened up and clasped his hands. Obviously, he was the party who must start the dialogue.

'Mr. Morton asked me to call in and see Miss Emma.'

'When?' Mademoiselle asked, and her question was accusatory, as if he were lying. Why would Mr. Morton not trust in her good service? It was an affront to her pride.

'Why, when he left for Vienna.'

'Emma is not here,' countered Mademoiselle abruptly, cutting off the young man's words. 'She has gone for a picnic. She will be out all day.'

'With her friend?' Ebhardt knew instinctively that the Governess was lying, but why, that was the question. The woman was hiding something. He couldn't understand the reason for her obvious hostility towards him either, but it was there nonetheless and she made no effort to disguise the fact.

'What friend?' she asked Ebhardt, and she was less than convincing in her vagary.

'Mr. Morton said that she had a friend staying with her.'

'No,' Mademoiselle half laughed as she replied emphatically. 'Not any longer'. The woman smirked as she spoke. 'I must forgive Mr. Morton this caprice,' she continued stonily, 'but he has wasted your time, Mr. Ebhardt.' She stressed the last words as if that was exactly what they were, the last words and that she had nothing further to say. Rudely she began to close the door.

'Oh,' said Ebhardt, standing his ground. He was not going to be turned away so easily. He had ridden a long way upon a friend's request and this reception was not what he had expected. 'Well, I will call back later, perhaps tomorrow?'

'We shall be busy tomorrow,' replied the Governess, and she batted her eyelids as if in insult. There was something hard about her face, there was a cold harshness in her features that Ebhardt found a little disconcerting. She held up her hand for him to graciously kiss goodbye.

'Call next week, Mr. Ebhardt.'

However, Ebhardt did not kiss her hand; instead he gave it a gentle squeeze and looked the woman directly in the eye. She did not even blink, simpering as she watched him step through the entry and leave, and there was no formal goodbye exchanged to finish the swift conversation. Outside, with a troubled mind, Ebhardt mounted his dappled horse and gently spurred the beast into a trot. Everything in this house was wrong and out of kilter too, he felt it but didn't know what to do.

Upstairs on the gallery, Carmilla hovered in the shadows. As it was early morning she kept within the shades where the sunlight did not stream through the windows. She had been observing quietly the interaction between the Governess and the young man. There was no expression on her face. Gretchin walked up the stairs and along the gallery carrying a breakfast tray. She paused before Emma's door and knocked softly. The maid listened and waited but there was no reply, no invitation to enter. Concerned that Emma had been ill and might have taken a turn for the worse, Gretchin opened the door and entered. She set the tray down on a stand, its porcelain cup belling against the silver milk jug and toast rack.

Emma was lying in her bed, breathing steadily but locked away in a fevered dream. The girl's eyes moved rapidly under their lids, her long lashes twitching. She looked so pale and grey that her skin was almost the same hue as the sheets, her blue veins standing out starkly against the white of her flesh. The sight shocked Gretchin and the serving girl ran up to the bed. She looked at the girl and saw her bosom heaving with the effort of breathing and Gretchin reached down and gingerly took hold of Emma's wrist. There was no response to her touch and the girl's arm was limp, like a doll's. How the young lady felt cold, as if the blood had ceased to flow in her veins. Her skin was clammy too, and she sighed audibly and groaned aloud as she dreamed. The vision of the invalid scared the servant and she immediately went in search of help. It was Renton who met her in the corridor and at first the sight of him doubled her fear, but she put her own discomforts aside and spoke to the butler.

'Mr. Renton, it's Miss Emma, she looks so ill!'

When Renton's eyes fell upon Gretchin they ignited with a tiny spark of mischief, but that spark cooled quickly and his eyes narrowed when he saw how visibly shaken the young woman appeared. He pushed her aside, and this time thankfully his fingers did not linger on her body, but rather he seemed bent on a strange concentration, and knocked at Emma's door. As it had been with Gretchin, there came no reply to his summons. Renton knocked again. The butler and the maid glanced at each other briefly, Gretchin's eyes wide with anticipation, and then Renton opened the door. He walked silently up to Emma's bed and gazed upon the sick girl.

'Does Mademoiselle Perrodon know about this?' he questioned Gretchin.

'I do not know, sir,' Gretchin replied, hovering in the background. 'I suppose so.' Another irrational fear had suddenly taken hold in her head and that was the thought of contagion. What if Miss Emma was now succumbing to the dreadful malady that was spreading in the vicinity? Many girls had already died. The thought struck a chord of terror into Gretchin, for did that spell doom for anyone who had touched her? Gretchin felt a terrible thrill shudder all the way down her spine. Renton turned and looked at her. 'She asked me to fetch her up a tray,' Gretchin stammered and she couldn't stop trembling.

'Very well, Gretchin,' Renton said, and she thought that he would dismiss her immediately but he did not. Instead he walked straight by her and strutted down the corridor and around the gallery and went downstairs. Now that he was gone Gretchin felt her anxiety begin to level out somewhat and her rationality return. She took a deep breath. Miss Emma needed tending and that was the priority. Despite the rumour and gossip and the stories of plague and illness that were abounding in the Duchy, Gretchin must see her duty done. As for what might come, well, Renton could deal with the rest of all that.

With Ebhardt departed Mademoiselle had returned to the breakfast table, but had proceeded no further in eating. Rather, she had shredded a piece of cold toast into bits and then tore those bits into smaller pieces. Her private agonies whirled inside her head. She stared at the crumbs. 'Yes,' she thought angrily, 'that's all I can ever have, is it not, only the crumbs of life, of love!' Mademoiselle almost laughed at herself for she did not know if she felt pathetically depressed or euphoric. Her emotions were ambiguous and it was Renton who interrupted her thoughts.

'Excuse me, Mademoiselle.'

She dropped the last piece of toast onto the pile of crumbs on her plate and looked up in sharp exasperation.

'Yes, Renton, what is it?'

'It's Miss Emma, if I may be so bold…' said Renton, his voice measured but still authoritative, as if testing and nudging a response from the woman. She knew that no matter what she should say he would challenge her anyway. That was just who he was, a dreadful, rude and ugly man. 'I think she should see the Doctor.' As he spoke those words the image of Carmilla blossomed magically in the doorway at his back. She was dressed in her vivid middle sky-blue gown and her hair was a fall of auburn syrup that cascaded over her bare ivory shoulders. She wore her ruby and it sparkled, nestled in her between her breasts. She held her hands clasped together at her front and she did not speak. Mademoiselle Perrodon was not in the mood to be challenged by Renton, and given her present emotional imbalance she tried to avoid his face by looking away. Regardless, it was no use, he was being insistent, and knowing his mind she understood that the tension between them would only escalate if she tried to avoid him. She was about to reply, the words of rebuttal upon her lips when she looked beyond his frame and saw the beautiful house guest standing at his back. Their eyes met. Carmilla's face remained blank, unreadable; her eyes did not even blink. There was something cool and yet dangerous about the vision of her that inspired awe. A silent communication was passing from the girl through the ether and sparking in the Governess's head. The stress and the angst suddenly melted from Mademoiselle Perrodon's features. For the shortest moment the world fell silent, a moment wherein not even the twittering of birds in the gardens could be heard, and there was only Carmilla's face, and the imaginary half-heard whisper of her cadent voice. Mademoiselle was suddenly strong again.

'I shall send for the Doctor, Renton, should I think it necessary,' she replied dismissively.

Renton looked incredulously at the woman, and he had the vague impression that Mademoiselle wasn't even really speaking, that her lips weren't moving but rather that her mouth was that of a puppet, that her voice was being manipulated. His brow creased and his lips turned up in a sneer, ready to bite back, but he thought better of such action and gave a slight nod of his head.

'Very well, Mademoiselle,' he replied coolly, but he wasn't about to be put out so easily. He bowed and turned and was startled to see Carmilla positioned directly at his back. She smiled warmly at him and he found that all he could manage was another lame nod. How long had she been standing there? Quickly the butler regained his composure and without casting another glance upon the two women, Renton walked from the room. Carmilla watched him go, and when he was gone she sat down beside Mademoiselle Perrodon at the breakfast table. A fine china teacup and saucer had slipped to the edge of the table and Carmilla gently pushed them toward the centre again. As she did this the Governess clasped her hand.

'Carmilla,' the woman whispered and gave an imploring and furtive look, one of complete adoration.

Carmilla regarded her with an almost cold and haughty glare but she did not speak. Mademoiselle let go of the girl's wrist and with her heart crushed as if by the weight of an uncompromising gravity, she felt like a spent candle, the flame snuffed out.

Chapter 11

A Matter For Modern Science

In which Renton summons Doctor Vordenburg, and the Doctor has cause to question his own scientific beliefs.

Trudi was voluptuous and if she possessed superior charms then those charms were naturally her bosoms. Large and firm were those breasts, and Renton now gazed upon them in amazement. At this moment Renton wanted nothing more than to be under her petticoats with his face between those breasts. He would have kissed them and stroked them and had he been able to, he would have squeezed them about his member. The thought made him go hard in his breeches. As Trudi was not a girl predisposed to embarrassment, when he could steal a kiss he would and when his hands were free they were hot upon her body. This did not bother the wench too much, in a tavern you expected men to misbehave, and Mr. Renton was no exception to the rule. However, if he wanted anything better than a quick squeeze he'd have to pay, and so far, tonight he had only paid for a stein of beer. Kurt, the Landlord smiled knowingly at Renton.

'Ah! Beautiful!' Renton remarked loudly, draining his beer and reaching for a refilled mug. The tavern wench replenished his drink. 'Still, not as beautiful as you, my love!' Renton slapped Trudi's bottom and clutched at its plump softness. She laughed aloud but brushed his fingers away with her free hand. Some farmers were gathered about a table and they were smoking and playing at cards. One fellow stood by the fire and played his accordion. Trudi skipped away with a tray and replaced their empty steins with fresh brimming ales. Renton was waiting her return. He reached for a filled stein.

'You have had more than enough tonight,' she told him, evading his hands. The air was thick with blue smoke and the cheer was getting more raucous.

'She is right, you know,' said Renton reflectively to the innkeeper, although the beer he had imbibed was now beginning to blur some of his better judgments. 'It would not do for a man in my position to be caught drunk and disorderly.'

Leaning towards Renton the Landlord gave him a sly wink. 'Oh, that's all right Mr. Renton. While your master is away…'

Renton took another swift gulp of his drink and sighed.

'That's just the point, Kurt,' he told the Landlord. 'That's just the point.'

'What is the point when you are not having a good time?' asked Kurt, pressing another refill upon the butler.

'I have been left in a position of responsibility,' Renton piped, nodding his head as he said the words, as if to reaffirm in his own mind that he was totally in charge of Morton's estate in the man's absence. This thought brought Mademoiselle Perrodon into his head and he scoffed aloud. That woman only thought that she was in charge. Well, he'd show her. She was so repressed and uptight that Renton suspected that she had never once lain with a man. The Governess didn't ring any bells for him either, although at a push he might have given her a quick round under the covers, in the dark, and then he guiltily returned his thoughts to Miss Emma.

'Miss Emma is very ill,' he confided to the Landlord, and Kurt pressed even closer, his eyes narrowing into slits, his brow creasing with genuine concern.

'Oh, and what is the nature of the illness, Mr. Renton?'

A sickness had been visited upon the Duchy of late and the news that the landholder's daughter might be afflicted was indeed a worry.

'How would I know?' snapped Renton, irritated because he felt his happy feelings rapidly evaporating. By way of a small apology for his cussing he added, 'I am not the Doctor.'

Unfortunately, the Doctor had not been able to come because Mademoiselle had not thought him needed.

'Why won't that blasted Governess let me send for him?'

The Landlord only stared open mouthed, failing to comprehend that the question was not actually directed at him. Renton could see Mademoiselle Perrodon in his mind's eye, see her sitting at the breakfast table all prim and smug and telling him 'I shall send for the Doctor, Renton, should I think it necessary.' Yet given how agitated she had appeared and how she detested him, Renton began to suspect that there was something deeper flowing under the surface of this situation, something ugly. He recalled Laura Spielsdorf's recent death and its awful circumstantial similarity to the illness infecting the countryside. There had been wild talk about, circulating gossip that laid the blame on forces that were legendary in these parts. Someone had remarked that for forty years 'they' had lain quiet but now 'they' had returned. Someone had uttered the word vampire. Renton had recalled Emma's pale and bloodless appearance. The thought of it sent a shiver along his spine. Who were 'they'? Ghosts? Revenants? It was ridiculous. Yet that Governess, she was indeed strange and willful and nasty, and he spoke aloud before he could rein in his mouth. 'Truly acting like a bloody vampire, that one!'

The accordion player stopped playing his music abruptly, and all the chatter in the tavern fell completely silent, and hearts and spades and royal courts fanned across the table in a sudden scatter. Trudi gasped and almost dropped her tray. Everyone in the tavern was staring at Renton.

'It was only a joke,' he apologised, but nobody responded.

'Not around here it isn't, Mr. Renton.' The Landlord stepped up to stand beside the butler, his countenance was serious. 'My father would tell you otherwise if he were here with us now. These parts are known to be inhabited by things that we do not understand. He could enlighten you as to some remarkable happenings. There's been three deaths 'round here lately, none of them by natural causes. Just a scream in the night and then found there, pale as death.'

'Pale as death!' Renton repeated in a whisper, putting down his stein. The pathetic image of Emma Morton lying upon her convalescent bower, white of skin and laboured of breath spun before his eyes. This vision was followed again by one of the sneering Governess and in that flash the joys of intoxication were vanquished and Renton returned abruptly to sobriety.

'The blood drained from them,' Kurt continued, his tone darker and his manner almost threatening.

'My God!' ejaculated Renton.

'We should not discount these happenings as merely empty nothings, my friend. These dead things grow thirsty in their graves, Mr. Renton. By day they sleep in their grave linceuls and arise at night, but only the warm blood of the living will serve to nourish them. Only blood can be humected, for blood is their food!'

Horrified, Renton leapt from his seat, and he threw down a handful of coins upon the counter, snatching up his cloak from where it hung on a peg by the door.

'Goodnight, Mr. Renton,' said Kurt, his face unemotional but grave, except for a little quiver that trembled at his lips. The villagers in the tavern remained silent even after Renton had passed through its door and back into the misty night that had earlier brought him. Outside in the street Renton swept up his cloak and tied it off at his neck, the ground mist was rising, making the narrow way a river of undulating white under the light of the moon. He shivered, for it was getting chilly, and he peered into the dark like one seeking a beacon. At the end of the street where the road met the forest he glanced up and saw the grey outline of the ruined castle on the hill, and then, out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw a rider on a black horse pass into the shadows. The vision was only fleeting and it might just have been his imagination for when he blinked there was nothing there. Yet he could not be certain. Another thing he could not be certain about was that Governess. She had her own agendas and he did not understand her, he knew that much. Renton did not like her either, but her behaviour had become peculiar, and quite suddenly too. He had to think too about Miss Emma. She looked so ill and the Governess had decreed that the Doctor should not be called. Why? Renton paused for a moment to do up the gleaming brass clasp of his cloak and then he turned about and headed across the street. The mist swirled in his wake and the only sounds that accompanied him were the soft splash of the water bubbling from the cistern and the yelp of a dog somewhere off in the dark. The tavern had fallen silent but no one had left it yet. When he arrived at a door beneath a rickety eave, he reached out and grasped the lion's head knocker, and rapped upon it. There was no immediate response. Renton waited silently for a short moment before he knocked again. Vordenburg opened his door and peered out. Although he was dressed in his nightclothes and cap he had not been asleep, there had been too much noise from the tavern for that. He looked at Renton with a twinkle in his eye and instinctively he knew that trouble was afoot.

'Doctor,' Renton addressed Vordenburg, and the Doctor responded with eagerness.

'What can I do for you, Renton?'

Through Emma's bedroom window could be seen a view to the high mountains. They were tall and steel grey against the panoply of the purple night. Their peaks glowed in the light of the full moon. That light glimmered in through the lace and cast a shimmering pattern of shadow upon Emma's drawn features. Her cheeks had sunken, and her eyes were blackly rimmed; she looked gaunt, pale, and sickly. There were flowers in a vase under the window, white snowdrops that were meant to cheer her up, but as the door opened, they sagged and went limp on their stems. Emma's eyes fluttered open. She had been dreaming of her dead friend Laura again, and Laura had been whispering something in her ear, a name that echoed from beyond the grave; an appellation that she did not recognise, a strange name, Marcilla... and it sounded so close to Carmilla... Emma tried to focus her eyes but her vision was blurry and the world seemed to spin a little. It made her sick, so she lay still, but there was someone hovering in the doorway, a shadow with long hair and lovely curves.

'Laura,' Emma whispered. Emma managed a smile. 'I am so happy you were able to come.' A strange perfume drifted into the room, of heliotrope. 'I am sorry,' Emma said softly, 'but I don't think we shall go walking tonight.' However, the shape was not Laura in a dream, but Carmilla, come to tend Emma, come to make her feel happy. The lovely stranger was dressed in white and she shone translucent like a phantom, the jewel at her bosom a tongue of fire ablaze upon her alabaster skin. As Carmilla glided to the bed she became less ethereal and more reality, solid, and Emma's vision cleared, and the beautiful guest perched upon the bedside in the tide of soft quilts.

'Carmilla?' Emma said weakly, trying to smile but it was no good. 'I thought you were someone else.' Carmilla reached out and stroked Emma's cheek with a slow and tender caress. She leaned over and held Emma close in an embrace, quivering, and there was a tear in her eye. Emma felt cold but so did Carmilla.

'What is it, my darling?' Carmilla asked lowly, continuing to hold her friend, and trembling just as much as Emma was trembling.

'Carmilla... I am dying.'

'Yes,' the girl replied, and it was the truth. Love was the killer and its final phases were inevitable. Carmilla had lived in the twilight for three centuries and had seen love expire so many times that she was now weary of it all. There was nothing that was new to Carmilla, nothing on the earth that was unfamiliar. There was no experience that anyone could ever have that she had not already cultivated, save for true love, and true love had always denied her. That was the awful thing and it set her apart, made her other. She might taste of it, sip at its font, but she must never count it as her own. Another tear spilled down her cheek. Yes, this lovely doll, her heart's amour, Emma, was destined for the worm. There was only one way to cheat the maggot, but that meant Emma had to pass through the veil of death and be reborn as she, Carmilla had been reborn, so many centuries ago. Yet to do so, to perform that blasphemy was forbidden, and only the elite few were granted that power. Her father had that power, but he would never advocate Carmilla using it, and Carmilla knew, even as she thought those thoughts that her father was outside, watching in the shadows, controlling her every move. It made Carmilla angry that even after death she was nothing but a puppet. He was always close by, and he not only stood guard but he spied too and he manipulated every move that she made. He watched her seduce and watched her feed and he enjoyed the spectacle of seduction and death. He was unto a marionette master who controlled her every action, every movement, governed her parasitic existence, and he robbed her of any free will she might ever have had. Loss carved a cold inscription into the hardness of Carmilla's heart, and on that stone only frost now accumulated. Her heart was buried under the grey dust of eons past and her emotions had been drowned in the blood of countless victims. As the centuries had dissolved into the ether and the world altered and rearranged about her, so did Carmilla's despair grow stronger. She had long ago realised in her heart's agony that despite her desire to be free, she would never be free. All that talk about men locking you up and robbing you of your will and your freedom now only emphasised her tortured hypocrisy.

'Will I live...until father comes home?' Emma asked brokenly.

Carmilla half smiled through her grief. She wanted to tell Emma that Mr. Morton was as ruthless as all other men were ruthless. He pretended a guise, and that guise bought him satisfaction in the world at the cost of other people's lives, at the cost of innocents. She knew this truth because she knew what the world really was. She knew what men really were, all of them beasts. Over all these years spent in darkness she had learned how to read people quite well. She had quickly suspected General Spielsdorf's secret and that Ebhardt would only bring Emma sorrow should she let him woo her. Men lived in a different world to women, one wherein they had all the say and women were mummers. No woman enjoyed the same rights as a man and being a woman provoked the notion of stupidity, but she had survived the world of men so far even unto death and she was far from stupid. Yet even in that knowledge what position did she truly occupy? She always did her father's bidding nonetheless. However, was she, Carmilla, any different to any man in that respect, any different to the base and the beastly in that she loved and then killed? She seemed to stalk like a predator and ravish what she pleased, but she was tortured within and the pain of knowing this conundrum benumbed a part of her that she thought should not exist within her undead flesh.

'Perhaps,' was all that Carmilla could say, and she leaned forward and kissed her love on the forehead. Emma whimpered, afraid that the shadows would claim her before her life had even really begun.

'Carmilla,' Emma whispered hoarsely, her throat running dry, 'there is something I must tell you.'

'Be quiet,' her friend replied, soothing, smiling benevolently. 'You do not need to tell me anything, for I already know.'

'The book...' stammered Emma and she weakly pointed to her dressing table, a tear trickling down her cheek. 'I know it was wrong of me to read it... to hide it, but...'

'No,' Carmilla told her, 'everything is all right. We all have secrets, some worse than others. Your secret is no sin at all. What person alive, or indeed even in death, would not pine for want of true romance and to die of pleasure?' Confused and in contrition Emma began to sob again.

'What do you mean, Carmilla? I do not understand. How can the dead hunger for romance?'

Carmilla kissed her companion lightly upon the lips.

'Even the dead can love,' she whispered with a strange and melancholic sadness as she held Emma tightly. In Carmilla's embrace Emma shuddered and wept and could think of nothing but her dead friend Laura and how just like her friend, only a premature coffin awaited the wasting flesh. There could never be a handsome young man to caress and to love and adore her till time should cease, and there would never be the throb of romance to inspire any daydream. As she sobbed Emma knew she did not feel for Carmilla what the girl felt for her. With salty lips Carmilla kissed her again and again, sealing off Emma's weeping and stroking her cheek, and although the kisses were a comfort she did not wish to reciprocate. Filtering through the dark outside, Carmilla heard the clop of horse hoofs in the drive and she knew whom it was who had arrived, and it was not the man in black.

Vordenburg rode up the carriageway, his cloak flapping in the wind. There were yellow lights in the windows to guide his way in the dark and when he came under the ivy and the portico, he slid from his horse and ran up to the door. After knocking once, it was answered briskly by Renton and the Doctor was ushered inside. He noted that the ivy had all turned sere, and it was strange because he thought he had read about this phenomenon in an old tract.

'Good evening,' said Vordenburg to the butler and the Physician removed his hat and looked about warily. Renton closed the entry upon the Doctor's back.

'Good evening, Doctor,' Renton returned.

'There is a sharp wind tonight, Renton,' the Doctor remarked casually, and Renton stepped forward and took the Doctor's travelling cloak. As the Doctor removed and passed Renton his tall black hat, Mademoiselle Perrodon opened the door that led to the Conservatory.

'Doctor?' She was most surprised at the man's late visit to the house. The Governess had not requested his services and a stab of suspicion pricked at her vain pride. She cast an accusatory glance at Renton.

'Mademoiselle Perrodon,' the Doctor greeted courteously, nodding slightly and giving a friendly smile.

On the gallery upstairs Carmilla stood statue still, looking down. No one could see her, but she was listening to them as they spoke. She saw Vordenburg clearly and her gaze burned with his image, burned with a cold and smouldering flame.

'I am afraid Mr. Morton is away,' Mademoiselle told the Doctor, her voice quite flat, attempting to be devoid of expression.

'Yes, I know. I had a message from him. He asked me to look in on Miss Emma.' Vordenburg smiled even more broadly, turning up the bedside charm, but Mademoiselle knew he was lying. This whole charade was an act. Were these men so pompous that they thought they could deceive her with a silly smile and a fatuous lie? The Governess clearly did not believe the man. She straightened her back and set her lips in a hard line, readying herself to ask him to leave. That he was handsome and enthralling went by the wayside, those superficialities were not about to work on her. No twinkling sapphirine eyes and schoolboy waggery were going to win him over the post, and Doctor Vordenburg, as far as Mademoiselle was concerned, was not going to be allowed to disturb the girl upstairs. The Doctor caught her unspoken challenge as if it was a tossed ball, and a provocative smile spread his lips wider. He did not reply another word, but instead stroked his bristly white moustache as he strutted straight past the woman and bounded upstairs to Emma Morton's room. Mademoiselle felt the breath catch in her throat and she gasped aloud at the man's audacity. Her body quaked in an angry shiver. Men were always so impudent, and this one especially. As the anger shone from her eyes she turned to the butler Renton, still standing by the door and holding the Doctor's cloak and hat.

'Was this you, Renton?' Mademoiselle accused.

'I, Mademoiselle?' Renton replied indignantly, arching his eyebrows and smirking.

She dismissed him with a scoff of disbelief, and picking up her skirts she ran to catch the Doctor, half way in his ascent to the upper floor.

'She has not been well,' Mademoiselle exclaimed in a faltering tone, 'but I'm sure it is nothing that need trouble you.' As if such words were going to put Erich off! He ignored her completely, for there was no way she was going to be rid of him before he had examined Emma Morton. An indefinable urge was making fire in Mademoiselle's veins, an urge to trip the man up and fling him down the stairs. The two made the gallery as Vordenburg removed his riding gloves and stuffed them in a trouser pocket.

'I'm sure I'll be able to put his mind at rest then.'

The Doctor did not even look at the Governess as he spoke, and this so incensed Mademoiselle's fury that her pale face coloured with ire. Arriving at Emma's door the Doctor knocked respectfully, but the knock was simply cursory for he did not wait for reply or invitation, but rather opened the door immediately and strutted within. The room was swimming with shadows and Vordenburg blinked as his eyes adjusted. He moved quickly to the bedside and turned up the lamp. The flame came up brightly and revealed the pale and sick girl floating prostrate in her tide of white sheets. Vordenburg placed his bag at the foot of the bed and picked up Emma's limp and doll-like hand, his fingers gently closing about the thin wrist. He waited and counted as the pulse throbbed weakly. The girl was so cold. From the corner of his eye he saw Mademoiselle as she hovered by the door, she was wringing her hands in agitated expectation not sure if she should enter, but she remained silent. The Doctor moved so that his frame obscured her vision and he replaced Emma's arm at length along her body, raised his fingers to the lacy hem of her bodice, and pulled the material back to expose her breast. Vordenburg leaned over close so that his nose almost touched the pale girl's skin. His magnifying lens pooled in a fold in the quilt, dangling on its chain, glinting in the lamp light. He held the glass to his eye and squinted. He saw clearly that which he had not wished to see, the twin scars, red and scabby, on Emma's breast. There was a livid bruise about the edges of the punctures as if a mouth had suckled there, and the Doctor recalled with a thrill of horror the same cicatrices that had branded Laura Spielsdorf's flesh. Upon this he reprimanded himself, for he had been dismissive when that young woman had fallen ill, but he would be vigilant this time. He wondered what vile evil were afoot, at what the Devil had sent to vex their lives.

This caused a contradiction in his mind, for Erich being a man of science had always refuted the world of the supernatural, and he involuntarily genuflected above his patient. Why he did this he was unsure, for he didn't even believe in God, and the reflex to cross himself and utter, if only in a whisper the name of Christ might have been just that, instinct and vague desperation in the face of what could not be readily explained. An action spurred by reflex. Yet the whole act of doing so pitched him teetering into that realm he so flippantly termed hysteria. If he continued to think such things he must surely descend into self-parody. Such ridiculous beliefs were spawned in the dominion of irrational women at their change of life, or manifest the menstrual irritations of teenage girls, not in the well-tuned minds of men of science. In Erich's world-view, religion and Christian faith generally meant little more than the many myths of any ancient and bygone civilization. The purpose pf those stories was to explain the natural world, although none of that had a proper grounding in science. He thought that realistically there had to be a rational explanation in any discipline for everything that made up the planet. Sometimes the answers were veiled. Vordenburg had once seemed confident in that premise, but this absurd notion that confronted him now, his making the sign of the cross was like one of those strange anomalies that he sometimes glimpsed through the lens of his microscope. He felt slightly embarrassed and foolish and could not understand his sudden lapse into faith. Regardless, science also demanded an open mind and religion blindly accepted the impossible. Still, contrarily, the possibility that Faith might be of use should not be discounted, and if he could save Miss Emma's life by the strangest of means, then be it so.

Since the death of Laura Spielsdorf, and given the clime of illness and mortality in the vicinity lately, Vordenburg had been exploring the problem to great lengths, secretly digging up old tomes and ransacking the records for cases of mortality that had been considered too difficult to explain. Any information that might offer up a glimmer of hope was information worth evaluating. For Vordenburg had to admit, to his own embarrassment, that the landscape of medicine often built its foundations and structures around the occluded netherworld called the supernatural. He had dug up some interesting tracts, of the occult and the antiquated, of the myth intertwined with the factual, and among them was Calmet's 'A Dissertation upon Apparition'. Therein he had explored the strangest phenomena, and read with interest the idea of the revenant, the corpse returned from the grave. Village gossip swore that such things were so. He had spoken to Kurt, and the Landlord had furnished his research further with obscure tales and superstition. Kurt was in deadly earnest when he related a story told him by his father, of a horror that had decimated the village forty years before, seized by a thirst for blood when the moon was at its full. Not only had Vordenburg listened with sceptical interest to this story, but there were also crude reports about the Baroness Meinster to consider. None of it verified, of course. In his search, there had been other, older and wilder texts that he had found too, like the 'Mercure Galant' and the 'De Masticatione Mortuorum in Tumulis'.

These might have given credence to Kurt's wild stories, but one could only consider them barbarous and ignorant and riddled with fanciful, villainous enormities. There was one short dissertation that Vordenburg had uncovered, a tract entitled 'History of Evil' that had been published forty years earlier, written by a young Moravian nobleman. The time frame seemed to coincide with Kurt's tale. It might have read as madness had it not been for the terrible similarities that presently afflicted this province. From it Vordenburg had learned one horrible and almost irrefutable suggestion, and the idea would not let go of his mind. It was spawned of the metaphysical world, and once he realised its portent he knew within his heart that he could not ignore the suggestion that these victims, the ones that died slowly, they were being willed to their graves by an interminable longing that a killing love dictated. This accounted for the victim's pining and for the lingering consumption, but above all it was the location on the body where the tell-tale marks appeared, on the breast above the heart that spoke a thousand words about the perpetrator's cravings and about the power with which he may have to deal. Here he was convinced that he was excogitating upon an intelligence that was perhaps older than time and no doubt parasitic and had adapted and changed as it passed through the centuries, and it could not break its hold upon its victim until the victim was dead… or worse. Mademoiselle Perrodon came forward, slowly, gingerly. She looked at the supine girl in the bed and then licked her lips. Vordenburg made a mental note of this action.

'Is she… dead?'

'Not yet, thank heavens!' the Doctor rebuffed sternly, and the woman shrunk back a step. A knock sounded upon the door behind her back and she spun about to see Renton. The butler was holding a large vase that was overflowing with greenery, and the greenery was tipped with little white and purple flowers. He entered the room without invitation.

'What the Devil have you got there?' the Doctor exclaimed, looking to the flowers and arching his eyebrows. Mademoiselle followed his gaze and gave a hiss of disapproval.

'Garlic flowers, sir,' replied Renton, pausing beside Mademoiselle, who stepped back and away towards retreat. 'They have an antiseptic smell.'

The Governess's face twisted up in fury.

'Have you been listening to village gossip? Vordenburg asked incredulously, hoping to sound sincere in his disbelief. Inside his head he felt a little hypocritical, because had not he too been listening to village gossip? He purported scepticism and doubted the veracity of such an apotropaic. They had their place in legend and myth but not in progressive disciplines, and yet Vordenburg now found himself ascribing to, and even giving in to superstition. The garlic flowers were of course a point of contention, but according to Culpeper they were a tuber owned by the god Mars and therefore volatile and thus a valuable weapon in the arsenal against whatever evil was to be faced. Part of Erich's rationale did not want to label that force 'evil' because he did not fully believe in such things, although circumstances in this incidence were oddly conflicting. The garlic plant had many wild and varied properties, sometimes inspiring heated vapours coming by corrupt agues that addled the brain. The Doctor remained a critic regarding the accuracy of the 'Complete Herbal', for it advocated many ridiculous purging medicines and electuaries that generally failed to help the person who had taken ill.

'No, sir,' Renton lied, keeping his expression blank. He knew that at any moment Mademoiselle Perrodon might erupt into a tirade in front of the Doctor.

'Illness,' the Doctor emphasised, 'is a matter for modern science. Not witchcraft!' Upon this point the Doctor now wavered, for how could he be so sure anymore? Perhaps a cure lay more in the realm of the priest.

'Yes, sir,' was all that Renton could reply, and accept that perhaps he had overstepped the line as to how far his authority stretched.

'Take those flowers away at once!' Mademoiselle demanded, interrupting the butler and the Doctor and shaking physically in her passion.

'Mademoiselle,' countered Vordenburg, 'this is my patient! Kindly do not interfere.' Confusion and vehemence both struggled in Mademoiselle's countenance. She stared at the Doctor and was upon the point of challenging him but thought better of it and abruptly left the room. She was not finished with this insurrection just yet and she knew who was responsible, Renton, and he would pay dearly. As she stormed away the Doctor approached Renton and stood beside him, watching the woman stride down the corridor. A wry smile was sneaking across his lips. 'Quite healthy… I suppose…' He met the butler's eye and nodded. 'You can get some more, Renton.'

'Yes, sir.'

Renton bowed slightly and walked away, leaving the bedroom door open as he passed through and went down the staircase. At the end of the hallway Mademoiselle turned, waited, and watched. She was trembling all over as if she were cold, and her gaze was wild, her eyes blackened in wrath. Erich matched her glare, and then she spun about, flew down the stairs, and vanished from sight. When he was alone, Erich closed Emma's bedroom door and stood pensively for a moment, marshalling his thoughts. Something told him to watch that Governess for she was high strung and vicious, but he must keep his focus directed towards Emma Morton's wellbeing. He had been wrong once, quite recently, and he did not want to be so wrong again and live to rue the day. This time precautions were needed, and allies too, and Renton had proven most useful indeed. The properties of the garlic herb were said to be medicinal, and it could not hurt to work with that if it helped in this fight. Vordenburg crossed to Emma's dressing table and rummaged through a drawer. His fingers separated bangles of worked gold and strings of pearls and pasted tiaras. Erich closed the drawer and his fingers touched a cedar box. He opened it and the contents glimmered in the light, sparks glanced off the gems that nestled in its plush emerald velvet lining. Among the earrings he found a silver filigree chain from which depended a cross of polished tourmaline. He picked it up and examined it and the jewelled symbol's facets played blue fire and threw comet tails into the ether. The cross seemed electric to Erich's touch, as if it were a thing alive.

'Perhaps… just perhaps…' he thought to himself, and it did not necessarily prove one way or the other that he was a believer, but maybe he must trust his instincts this time, even if instinct seemed irrational. Erich moved to the bed and lifted Emma's head from her pillow. He slipped his hand beneath her strawberry blonde hair, looped, and clipped the chain about the supine girl's slender throat. Emma breathed deeply and groaned but otherwise did not respond to his touch. Erich stared for a long moment at the two puncture marks in her breast, about an inch above her nipple, and then he stroked the girl's cheek and his stroke lingered upon her chin. Vordenburg smiled and continued to stare as Emma breathed shallowly, and his fingers roamed along the line of her swanlike neck and paused for a long minute upon her creamy white bosom, just above her heart.

Gretchin had been ordered to take more garlic flowers to Emma's room and on her way up from the kitchen she passed the Doctor at the bottom of the stairs. She paused and the Doctor nodded, but Gretchin flinched when she realised Renton was behind her. She moved on quickly, though Renton's eyes did not follow her this time, his mind was preoccupied with other matters. He helped the Doctor into his cloak.

'Where is Mademoiselle?' Erich asked as he fixed his clasp and retrieved his riding gloves from his pocket.

'I do not know, sir.'

'Very well.' Vordenburg cast his eyes upstairs and then turned back to Renton. 'See that Miss Emma is not disturbed.' Buckling his saddlebag Erich headed for the door. 'Have one of the maids sit up with her all night. I will be back in the morning.'

'Very good,' said Renton, lowering his voice and adding in a serious tone, 'I have sent for Mr. Morton, sir.'

'Good.'

Renton opened the door and gave Vordenburg his tall hat.

'Whatever happens,' Erich stressed, 'keep her away from Miss Emma.'

'Yes, sir,' replied the butler, and then speaking louder so that he deliberately might be heard, he ushered Vordenburg through the entrance. 'Good night, Doctor.'

Renton closed the door and his eyes looked to the upper floor.

Gretchin had placed a vase of garlic flowers on the dresser and another on a stand under the window. She busied herself with straightening Emma's covers. The poor girl had been dreaming, and in the grip of the delirium she had been writhing like a worm in the loam and all the while groaning. The sight and the sound had made Gretchin herself squirm with quietly suppressed unease. Perhaps it was the odour of the garlic that had upset the girl's sleep. Gretchin knew that most people found the plant had a pungency too strong to tolerate, though she didn't mind the odd perfume of the flowers at all; in fact, she found the scent quite acceptable. She had just finished straightening Emma's sheets when the door opened and Mademoiselle Perrodon stood in the entry but did not enter.

'Gretchin!' she snapped angrily, and the startled maid stood bolt upright. She saw the Governess and curtsied in respect, but Mademoiselle seemed to be shaking and her voice was cracking. She was obviously upset. 'Who told you to put those there?' The woman pointed to the garlic blooms.

'Mr. Renton, Mademoiselle,' Gretchen replied. She observed the Governess roll her eyes in disgust at the mention of the butler's name.

'Take them out please.'

'Mademoiselle, he…' Gretchin began to protest, confused by the contradictory orders.

'Take them out!' Mademoiselle shouted, livid in her anger, furious that Renton should override her authority. She slammed the door shut and strode away to find the upstart butler. The bang made Gretchin jump, but Emma slept on and did not stir. Not knowing what she should do or from whom she should take orders, Gretchin picked up the two vases once again. 'Yes, Mademoiselle,' she said to the silence, mocking the Governess and walking briskly toward the bedroom door.

The Governess stormed along the gallery, her face set in a fury. Renton met her half way.

'Renton,' she spat vehemently, 'will you kindly remember that I oversee this house in Mr. Morton's absence!'

'Certainly, Mademoiselle,' Renton replied derisively. Who was she to tell him what to do? The resentment boiled away inside his skin. He did not like her nor she him, but what did that matter at this moment? He steadfastly refused to recognise her as his superior now or at any point in the future.

'Then why did you order those…' and Mademoiselle stuttered in her ire, 'those weeds to be placed in Miss Emma's room?'

'Not I,' replied Renton coolly, 'the Doctor. I am sure that we are agreed that he oversees the patient.' In the middle of this heated exchange Gretchin approached timidly. She did not want to get into the argument but she knew she would be jostled into doing someone's bidding; it just depended on who possessed the dominant personality. Renton spoke calmly. 'Take those back, Gretchin,' he ordered, and the maid stopped still, frozen by indecision.

'Sir?' she questioned, afraid that this tense situation was only going to get worse. For a blank moment, all three people did not speak. Mademoiselle stared at the vases of garlic and her face screwed up in revulsion.

'Take them away!' the Governess demanded, taking a small step back.

Gretchin still could not move, but hovered, holding the vases and struck dumb for fear of saying the wrong thing. As if he had read her mind, Renton suddenly reached out, took one of the vases from Gretchin's hand, and passed it to the angry Governess.

'Why don't you take them away, Mademoiselle?' he said slyly and the woman flushed hotly and almost hissed, backing away from the flowers as quickly as a cat and into her bedroom, shutting the door loudly. The butler turned to Gretchin and handed back the vase. Without speaking Gretchin curtsied and returned the flowers to Emma's room. Renton smiled as he watched her go, looking at the maid's hips as they swayed slightly, and feeling justifiably smug he returned downstairs.

Carmilla heard Count Karnstein as he called his command. The words were filtered through the wind and came to her ear as does a half-heard echo. He waited outside in the park, waited for her to do his bidding. Something within her wanted to refute the command, and she knew what it was. Love made her question herself, and question too the things that she had to do to survive, even as the undead. Love might also make her weak. She understood that if she gave in to its tender mercies damnation could follow in its wake. Whatever her perspectives, the lines of the world were rearranging, shifting after all these long centuries, and Carmilla raised her hands to her temples. She flattened her ivory palms against her ears and tried to quiet the voice of her father, make him silent, make him go away, but it was like trying to tell the wind to cease, and she found herself growing angry. After an eternity had passed she left her casement and left her room, and slipped quietly along the gallery, stopping outside Emma's door. Something was wrong, she sensed the change; in fact, she smelled the change, for it wafted through the aperture of the door-frame and it made her sick. She opened the door. As the panel swung back it revealed two vases filled with garlic flowers, one on the bedside table, and one beneath the window. The window was open and the wind ruffled the drapes, carrying the dreadful stench of the plants to Carmilla's nostrils. She looked to the girl in her sick bed, and amid the tide of oyster coloured sheets she saw something that gleamed and sparkled like a blue star.

The jewelled cross radiated brightly, it was a spear of azure light that blazed from the cradle of Emma's breast, and Carmilla gasped and looked away. She felt her body quake and a terrible fire raked through her flesh. Carmilla closed the door quietly, her mouth set in a grimace of fury.

Vordenburg had ridden into the forest, keeping to the path, watching the shadows in the moonlight as he rode. The forest was quiet, deathly quiet save for the whispered gaggle of a stream flowing down the embankment to the left of the way. He pondered the night's events as he rode slowly through the wood. This whole business of Emma Morton's illness bore a distinct similarity to the events that had led up to the death of Laura Spielsdorf. Surely this could not possibly be merely coincidence. This thought worried him. What was going on? Vordenburg wanted to believe that in this superstitious land there could be a perfectly logical explanation for these mysterious happenings. His diagnosis had been wrong before and now he doubted himself. There were other factors that bothered him too, strange things to which he had to plead ignorance, and that rankled him deeply. One of those things was Morton's Governess, Mademoiselle Perrodon. She was most peculiar, an alien to this province, and she had been so vehement and so apathetic and dismissive of Emma's condition. Something was going on there. Vordenburg realised that he needed to arm himself with more knowledge, for when he returned in the light of day his first and foremost mission was to prevent Emma Morton from coming to any further harm. He had begun to formulate a theory about the Governess, but he had to admit that it was mostly based on Renton's objectives. However, Vordenburg had little other information, apart from local superstition, with which to be guided. As he thought about the problem, a banner of darkness ruffled fleetingly across the path before him, something that rippled of shadow and threaded about the trees. The vision was so brief as to be all but a glimpse, and the night air had become suddenly and bitingly cold. Perhaps it was a bird whose startled call broke the silence, the sound making Vordenburg's mount baulk and leap. The cry was followed by a long moment of utter silence. Vordenburg's horse became spooked and it snorted in fear.

'Come on, boy,' the Doctor coaxed, gently patting his mount's neck, but the horse stammered in its stride. 'Jupiter, come on, boy.' Soothing and encouraging words they were that issued from Erich's lips, yet they were all but useless. The horse snorted and abruptly stopped and would not be coaxed forward. With faltering steps Jupiter began to prance backwards along the path, tossing his head in a fury. A low branch tapped against Erich's shoulder and he stooped to avoid being struck. Along the darkened forest path, a cold wind came rushing. It poured down from the alpine heights and tore through the trees, whirling a maelstrom of leaves about the frightened animal and its rider. Vordenburg's hat was torn from his balding head and bounced away into the shadows, his cloak danced up and flapped madly. The horse spun around, but the Doctor pulled hard on the reins. Champing at the bit Jupiter whinnied in terror, his eyes growing white and popping.

'Come 'round, Jupiter,' the Doctor insisted, but the horse did not respond. 'What's the matter with you?' Jupiter jumped into the air and spun about again, whipping his tail into a stinging lash and voiding his bowels in the path. At that moment, violently tossed upon his mount's back, Vordenburg lost directional control of the animal as it bucked and screamed. With a startled cry, the man slid down in his saddle. For a moment, he teetered upon the edge of a fall, his feet twisting in the stirrups. In a desperate attempt to break his fall Erich's fingers uncurled from the bridle and let go, grasping at thin air. Turning circles in distress and rearing up on his hind legs, Jupiter bucked and tossed Vordenburg to the ground. The Doctor fell into the darkness and hit the ground hard, the horse screamed and bolted into the forest, flinging stones from stumbling hoofs, bridle straps streaming like undulating ribbons in the wind. Painfully Vordenburg had landed heavily upon sharp stones, and the piercing agony caused him to pitch onto his left side. His hip struck against a large rock and he felt his pelvis jar with force, his elbow sinking into a muddy rut. The breath was crushed from his lungs. As he rolled over in agony his cheek was smeared with the horse's excrement and the warm filth befouled his lips.

Coughing and spitting and gagging as he sucked the breath back into his deflated lungs he tumbled down a grassy embankment. The roll was littered with sharp-edged rocks and they lacerated his skin. With a pained cry Erich tumbled into a briar and then came to rest at the bottom of the ditch, flat on his back beside the water's edge, his body scratched and bruised. He tried to catch his breath, but the cold wind rushed down from the wood and covered him in a wave of parched leaves. The leaves clogged up his nostrils and Erich felt as if he were choking upon the dung that polluted his mouth. With a retch, he spat out the excrement and with a laboured and deep inhalation, he managed to wipe away the vile waste, but he had lost sight of Jupiter. The night had swallowed up the horse, but when Erich had regained his breath, he gasped out a useless call, though his voice was stifled by the rushing of the wind.

'Jupiter, Jupiter, come back, boy!' The Doctor's stentorious breath expelled sharply and the words turned into mist as they left his lips. He knew the horse was gone and that there was no use any longer in calling after it, for Jupiter had bolted in terror. Yet there was something else here in the dark, something that spiralled up out of the blackness. He felt its nearness and a tingle ran along his spine. It was surely one of those silly little anomalies that he had so often encountered in his long search for the truth; yet irrationally he could not explain his own fear. Still, it was with him, here in the night, in the dark, vacillating with a flow of nastiness and violence that was coming on fast and palpably real. Vordenburg felt it, whatever it was, like a pulse throbbing in the dark, thrumming in his ear. As it came it made a harsh snarling cry, one that was half-masked by the roar of the wind, and the sound was high and strident and bone chilling. Could it be a growl, a feral animal perhaps, even a wolf? There was a torment in his chest when Erich breathed and he raised a hand and felt his ribs, wincing in pain as a burning sensation shot through his injured elbow. His torso smarted with hurt when he pressed his fingers to his chest. With difficulty, he struggled painfully upright and clambered to his knees, his hat gone, his sleeve ripped, and knelt in the dark like a supplicant before an altar. He listened disparagingly to the last dull echoes of his horse's receding hoof-beats, and the wind plucked ferociously at his cloak. A blast of cold whipped in the air.

The dark came alive then, came alive in the light of a silver moon as the great celestial lamp burst from its cloudy prison and beamed through the vaulted trees. By the light of that moon Erich beheld a white vision skimming over the surface of the stream. The reflection was not a thread of mist and yet it weaved and floated, but it moved quickly and possessed a hallucinatory solidity. It resembled a great cat with a tail that thrashed in the waves of silver-black water, but the vision was twisted and stalked upright and the thing might have, at flickering points, appeared to be feline and human. He glimpsed the white and ectoplasmic form as it whirled through the viridescent spears of the reeds, trailing silver fire upon the water's surface, the water rippling in its wake. It came upon him swiftly and when Vordenburg looked from the water to the bank of the stream, he saw nothing there that could cast a reflection at all, and he gasped. The wind blew hard against the Doctor's body, forcing him back, bending him with force like a sapling. It took away his breath. The unreal figure leapt from the surface of the water and onto the muddy ground, and in that instant, it blossomed into solid reality, metamorphosed into the body of a beautiful woman with long auburn hair and red, red lips.

Her marble skin was visible through the sheer fabric of her gown, her breasts, her dark pubis, and her hips and thighs. Her feet seemed to glide rather than to take step upon the terrestrial earth, and Erich's eyes filled with the wonder of her. His mouth opened wide in an exclamation of amazement. The wind blew grit into his throat. Sputtering and coughing the Doctor tried to regain some of his senses. Against the blast of the wind he fought, and he attempted to stand up, but the beautiful female phantom bore down upon him, pressing her icy skin against his flesh. Her weight was like a block of ice that fell onto Erich's body and forced him to the ground, prostrate on his back. The Doctor fought against the female creature, thrashing at her, but she was strong and his weak flailing proved useless. Over the rocks the two bodies rolled, locked in a struggle that foretold the certain death of the loser. She was strong, stronger than any man Vordenburg had ever known, her grasp so powerful that her fingers closed and squeezed through his muscles right to the bone.

A snarl erupted from the woman's lips, a growl unto an animal's growl, issuing from her glistening red mouth, spilling beyond a row of long pointed teeth from which dripped a stream of ropey slime. The smell that poured from that infernal maw was rank, putrid with the stench of tainted blood, and her teeth snapped down wildly, viciously, diving for his face. Vordenburg gasped and a foetid gob of sticky mucus made a long dripping string toward his mouth. He tried to turn his face away but could not, for the creature held him fast, but the Doctor managed to raise his forearm to shield himself in the attack. Yet the defensive action was futile. The spittle seared his lips and burned his tongue as if it were acid. In that instant, his icy blue eyes locked with those of the female demon. Therein Vordenburg beheld the terrified reflection of his own face, his own scream caught in the blue sapphire flame of her mad gaze, and he balled his fist and thrust his hand into that awful snapping jaw. The sharp teeth grazed his knuckles and went in deep, lacerating his hand. A spray of blood spurted from the wound as barbed papillae rasped Erich's flesh. The Doctor gave a pained cry and the demon's tongue flashed about his balled fist, sucking at the warm surge of blood. Then its snarl became even more guttural, more feral and the monster tossed her head savagely from side to side, like a dog savaging a rabbit, and Erich screamed and let go. In that violent motion, the razor-sharp fangs flayed the skin from the back of his hand, peeled it away as if it were the skin of a ripe peach, spraying blood, and exposing the thick blue veins and tendons beneath. Blood spurted upon his face and down his arm. In his terror, Vordenburg thought he heard the strangest thing above the sound of his own cries. It was a voice, no, a scream, that infiltrated his head and squeezed physically at his brain. For one horrible moment, he thought that he might throw up, for the sound made him horribly dizzy. Although, it was not truly a voice, as he knew speech, it was the sound of something animal that had learned the art of human speech, yet got it all wrong. The reverberating noise throbbed and pulsed and became all distorted in the rushing wind. The sound rose to a crescendo, screeching between the thin periphery of life and the kingdom of death. It was a snarl and a bellow and a shriek mutated into a mad howl. Raking away within his head, telling him that his fate was sealed, Erich's ears began to bleed.

The howl rang out memory, and memory flashed him back into Laura Spielsdorf's bedroom as the invalid lay awaiting his examination. Memory made him view, as an outsider watches, his own actions. He looked on as he inserted his fingers into Laura's young flesh, between her thighs and into her virginal depths. Vordenburg could even feel the warmth of her, and the spread of her as his fingers pushed into that place where no male flesh had ever penetrated. Memory accused him and memory stabbed at him and tore one vision away for another, watched on with a ferocious eye as a long and lingering stroke played at the pink bud of Emma Morton's nipple. The scent of her sickly flesh still lingered upon his hands and Vordenburg knew then his violations. He had only a moment to react to his transgressions before he realised just what it was that assailed him. He had been foolish and wrong in his assumption that the Governess lay at the root of this evil. Why he had even thought that the woman might have been a villain was as foolish a concept as he had ever had. It was only akin to his crossing himself and suddenly and stupidly believing that God might be a real power. Although he had not laid eyes upon her beautiful face, this demon was the General Spielsdorf's lovely guest, the young woman who had mysteriously disappeared on the morning of Laura's demise. With a gasp Vordenburg managed to snatch up a twig from the whirling maelstrom of the wind and into the soft earth at his side he etched two lines in the dirt. The stick snapped in twain before the cross was completed and so did his fingers. The demon held his wrist firm and splayed his fingers, drawing them slowly back, one by one, breaking them at the last joint.

Vordenburg screamed and screamed again but there was no ending the torture. The creature covered him with its palpitating form and it altered, transmuted into a hideous half-formless mass that sprouted sickle shaped claws, and those claws were honed, lethal, poisoned dripping ungula, curved like those of a cat. With lethal precision those spurs flashed yellow in the moonlight, slashed out to rip away his clothing and push his legs apart. The creature gave a terrible howl as it paused in its violence, the needled tip of its sharp claw poised at the entrance to Erich's body, and then in triumph it thrust in deep and the Doctor shrieked. As it tore away at his insides the monster raked his outsides with its other claw, peeling away skin with surgical precision, making a bleeding mess of Doctor Vordenburg's handsome face. He was not so attractive beneath his thin, pink casing of flesh. Indeed, the horror that was exposed spoke a thousand words about the ugliness within all men. Men took what they wanted and defiled beautiful girls to gratify their bestial lusts. They were all animals to Carmilla, and their base desires were the filth from which all misery sprang. The horror that was man had pursued and vexed her through an eternity of the hunger perpetual. In hating these men and the branded power that came with them, Carmilla understood how much she despised that part of her own being. She wanted freedom and the liberty to live and to love, though she also understood that those emotions were but a sentimental longing that would always be impossible, because she was dead and could never return to the land of the living. As the Doctor gagged on his own screams Carmilla threw back her head, like a lioness, and roared in defiance to the night, to her father and to the moon, and then she ripped Erich to pieces.

Chapter 12

Destination: Karnstein Castle

In which Mr. Morton returns to his manor and how Baron Hartog, General Spielsdorf and Mr. Morton proceed to the ruin of Karnstein Castle.

Mr. Morton's coach ploughed through the forest, its team straining at the straps. The horses were wet with rain and sweat and their knotted manes were tangled with brittle leaves. They had driven through a storm and their flanks were flecked with ochre mud and the road was sodden and slippery. The coach bounced over muddy potholes and jolted with bone shaking regularity, but the driver did not slacken the pace. The carriage had passed the village and the castle on the hill some time ago, soon it whipped by the ruined bell tower and now at last it was approaching the grounds of Morton's estate. Upon coming home Mr. Morton was twofold in his feelings. He was angry that his business in the Capital should be interrupted so suddenly by a letter that bespoke of grave dangers concerning his daughter should he tarry in the city for any undue length of time. He was aware that Emma had been unwell, but he had left her in the capable hands of Mademoiselle Perrodon. Or so he had thought. In any case, who were his servants that they should dictate his movements? He was even angrier because the missal had been signed by his butler, Renton. Renton had advised that Emma's circumstances had taken a turn for the worse. The letter also related that it was best if Mr. Morton returned home immediately, and it also implied that there were other issues the gentleman must immediately address. There was a critical possibility that she might even die before he got back. The butler, in his temerity, advised that this truth could not be overstated. Morton had already made provision by ensuing that young Ebhardt would call on the house in his absence, and Ebhardt had not sent forth any bad news. If anything were wrong with his daughter surely the young man would most certainly have contacted him immediately. Renton had taken it upon himself and called in the Doctor, a decision that he had stated had rankled Mademoiselle Perrodon.

She was, the letter concurred, acting mysteriously. What was this Governess playing at, indeed, what was everybody playing at? Morton had thought Mademoiselle Perrodon capable of running his house while he was away, but the fact of the matter had become obvious, that she was not. Now she too it appeared had been stricken with some lassitude and had taken to her room and would not receive anyone. Mr. Renton believed that he had no other choice but to summon his Master home. The situation was intolerable. Perhaps some form of discipline might be called for to sort this out, and Morton entertained the brief phantasy of his options. Just after eight o'clock, when the sun had breasted the mountain peaks, the coach pulled up to Morton's door and he alighted, his body aching and sore from the bone-rattling jostling it had taken during the long ride from Vienna. Morton stretched his back and legs and went inside. Ascending the stairs, the gentleman met Renton. The butler was hurriedly donning his coat as he came down from the upper floor.

'Good morning, sir,' Renton said, straightening his collar.

'Good morning,' Morton replied distractedly, and he was irritated that such social pleasantries were necessary when the morning had been far from delightful. Mr. Morton removed his tall hat and cloak and passed them to the butler.

'How is my daughter?'

'She's sleeping, sir, peacefully.'

'Sleeping peacefully' inferred that she might already be counted among the dead, and Morton pushed the valet brusquely aside and ran up the stairs. Shrugging, Renton followed Morton to the upper landing. In the girl's bedroom Morton encountered the maid Gretchin. The girl had stayed with Emma all through the night and she herself was weary. She smiled courteously and suppressed a yawn; a few stray hairs were hanging limply from the fringe of her bonnet. The master came into the room and hurried up to the bed. Gretchin immediately rose from her chair and crossed to the doorway, sliding away from Mr. Renton as she stepped into the hall and awaited any new instructions. Emma looked pale and sick and this confused Morton. He might have reproached himself because he paid so little attention to his daughter, but she did look terrible, so pale and wan and possibly even upon the brink of death. It seemed his valet had been right to call him home. Morton could not help but think of the fate that had befallen General Spielsdorf's niece, but then he smiled oddly at this realisation and his gaze went momentarily blank. Death, he thought, had its allures and testing its boundaries was somehow strangely attractive. For a protracted moment, he looked upon his daughter, wondering if she were breathing, and then she groaned and half rolled over in her sick bower. She appeared for one moment so much the image of her mother, especially as the woman had been toward the end of life, so much so that Morton gulped and almost had to look away.

'I have sent for the Doctor, he will be here soon,' Renton ventured, noting that Mr. Morton's countenance had become ashen. Even more cinereal was Emma's face, drained of the colour and vitality of splendid youth, and she seemed to be dreaming for her eyes were darting rapidly under the lids. The girl looked so sick, but it was with craving and hardly tenderness that Morton reached out and felt her cold, thin hand. The feeling of her clammy white skin under his hot living touch made Morton shudder in both repulsion and yearning. An expression of confusion knotted up his face and he closed his eyes. No, he told himself, he must not let his soul out here, not in front of his supine child, not in front of the servants, not in front of anyone. It would be all too easy to give in to this hunger; all it would take would be a wish, a desire, a touch… He dropped his daughter's icy hand and shedding the desire for death's dark pleasures in favour of the needs of the real world, Morton turned to the butler and asked tersely for an explanation.

'Had it not been for the Doctor,' Renton protested almost indignantly, 'and these remedies…' he affirmed, pointing to the vases of garlic flowers and intimating the cross looped about the girl's neck. Nonetheless he did not finish his sentence. Of course, to Morton it sounded all so grotesque and unbelievable, that a garden weed should have the power to stave off a life-threatening illness and that belief in superstition could afford protection against calamity. What foolish fables had been spreading through this household in his absence?

'It's ridiculous!' Morton refuted. 'I cannot believe it.'

'Neither could I, sir, at first.' Renton shook his head as if to reiterate that he too had found the whole thing incredulous until this moment. 'Please, let the Landlord tell you.'

The landlord came to the Morton house as the sun passed its zenith. The daylight shivered with a chill breeze as he walked up to the front entrance, the dust of dead ivy scattering in his footsteps. Kurt removed his tri-cornered hat and knocked upon the door. It was Renton who received and ushered him into the parlour, and there to meet with Mr. Morton. The English gentleman was seated in a velvet chair, fiddling impatiently with the lace at his cuff. He looked up sharply.

'Do tell me,' Morton began, 'what is it that I should know, what is it that vexes my daughter?'

The Landlord took a deep breath and twirled his hat in his hand. 'It is the Karnsteins come back.' His voice was flat and emotionless; his eyes didn't even blink as he spoke. Morton gazed at the man and then at Renton and a derisive scoff was forming his lips into a circle. Surely this joke went too far.

'To that old ruined castle?' he remarked incredulously. What was this rubbish and what did a long dead family and superstition have to do with his daughter's illness? Mr. Morton was not ignorant of the tale of the Karnstein family, had heard it when he had first purchased this property. It was a colourful legend like any other, one that spun an aura of mystery about the countryside to keep the tourists entertained, but not one that could be taken seriously. It was believed that the once noble family had all died, or been killed, and that it was said their restless ghosts haunted the province. It was their castle on the hill above the hamlet, but their misdeeds were nothing but a legend, a fairy tale. Only simpletons believed such drivel.

'The story is they were all wiped out.' Morton remarked with contempt, although he had to admit that he was no authority on the subject and did not know the exact circumstances of the Karnsteins demise. He had assumed the Karnstein line had fallen to a bout of plague or some other virulence that had eons ago burned its way throughout Stiria. Such pestilence was not uncommon. Morton gave a dismissive wave of the hand. This was too fantastic, to think that ghosts were responsible for his daughter's sickness.

'Aye, sir, so we thought.' The Landlord nodded solemnly and in his pause, they heard the first faint rumble of distant thunder as it gathered in the mountains. Once the thunder was silenced Kurt began to relate a short, but peculiar history.

'There was a young nobleman,' he began, and Morton and Renton were silent as the landlord spoke, 'whose sister was murdered by them.'

Upstairs a door opened upon the corridor and a contorted, feline shadow spilled onto the carpet.

'This gentleman, the Baron Hartog…' Kurt continued, his voice measured and unchanging. 'He crept up to the castle late at night and he lay in wait. By the light of the moon he watched from the tower that rises over the castle graveyard. Baron Hartog saw a shroud and he knew that without it there would be no resting place for any vampire.'

'Vampire!' Morton snorted. 'How preposterous!' The Englishman turned away in dismissive scorn. He felt that he really did not have time for any sillier stories and that this insult to his intelligence was utterly unbearable. Vampires, natural history asserted were a species of bat discovered in the far southern deeps of the Americas, mammals that drank blood. The Landlord was not speaking about natural history, but rather of unnatural history, and the vampires he intimated were the reanimated corpses of the long dead Karnstein family.

'I know, sir, because I remember that night clearly,' said Kurt, and then he fixed Mr. Morton with an intense stare, steadfast in his surety and that nothing would sway him otherwise. 'If I may continue…'

Sullenly Morton nodded his acquiescence.

'Baron Hartog took the shroud and waited,' and here the Landlord paused as he recalled the Baron all spattered in blood, staggering into his father's tavern and falling exhausted upon the floor. 'He chopped off the head of the vampire and he staked the rest in their graves. That was forty years ago, Mr. Morton, and the Karnsteins have now returned.'

'If it was forty years ago and they were all killed, then how could these things be here now? It's nonsense.' Morton felt his breath becoming short and there was a heated restriction beginning to press down upon his body. For some unaccountable reason, he felt the stirrings of excitement.

'I beg you to listen to him, sir,' Renton interjected. 'Think of Miss Emma.' Impatiently Morton sprang up from his chair. Had everybody lost their minds? With an indifferent groan, he made a rude gesticulation in the air. Suddenly the air had become thick about them and hot and Morton wanted to hear no more of their nonsense.

'If you don't believe me, sir, ask General Spielsdorf,' said Kurt solemnly, and a flicker of recognition passed over Morton's face. In that moment of recollection, the Englishman glimpsed the possibility that external and stranger forces might have to be recognised in lieu of a less ridiculous explanation. Had not the General's niece died recently in similarly mysterious circumstances?

'General Spielsdorf? Yes, I remember now. That was where he said he went!' Morton recalled Ebhardt's visit to his house, and in his fevered mind's eye he replayed the young man's words: 'The General has gone away, sir, to visit a friend, the Baron Hartog.'

Morton appeared distracted as he flailed about not knowing immediately what to do next. If he accepted this phantasy then he must accept all the foolish terrors of childhood.

'Sir?' asked Renton, thinking that someone should take immediate charge of this vital situation and that the time for action was now if they were to save Miss Emma's life.

'Where is the Doctor?' Morton asked curtly. 'You said earlier that he would be here this morning.' The Doctor at least would put this rubbish about vampires to bed, for he was a man of the real world. Both Renton and the Landlord shrugged their shoulders.

'It is past noon.'

'Yes, he said he would come,' Renton reiterated. 'Shall I send for him?'

Turning abruptly away Morton snatched up his riding crop. 'No, I'll go myself.'

The gentleman stormed from the parlour and left the other two men to stare after his receding footsteps. There was much to do, and though his daughter's life hung in the balance, it was the darkness within his soul that now propelled his actions. Inside his mind there was fire and the fire made a delirious madness burn over his skin. He was glad to leave the house immediately. Outside he called for his horse.

From the upper-floor the shadow roiled and twisted into solidity and became the girl Carmilla. She stood still, as if hewn from stone and she was looking down and watching intently as Morton slammed the door in his exit. The only movement in her flesh at all was the faint and secretive smile that touched upon her carmine lips. Gretchin gently closed Emma's bedroom door. She did not hear the beautiful Carmilla behind her until the girl spoke, startling the maid who spun around, her hand leaping to her bosom.

'Gretchin,' said Carmilla, a little apologetic grin upon her lips, as if it had amused her that the girl should react in fright. 'Do not disturb Mademoiselle Perrodon today, please. She does not feel well.'

'Yes, Miss.' Gretchin gave a slight curtsy.

A flicker of concern then passed over Carmilla's face and she paused with her lips pursed upon a question. 'How is Miss Emma?'

'She doesn't seem to get any better,' Gretchin confessed. 'She had a quiet night. Are you going in to see her, Miss?'

The maid extended her hand to open the door for the house guest, but Carmilla arrested her with a gentle touch.

'Perhaps…' and Carmilla stalled as she spoke, 'but I cannot stand the smell of those flowers.'

Gretchin merely nodded, knowing that the flowers were a point of contention that would bring her into conflict with Mr. Renton should she go counter to his orders. Yes, they did have a strong odour, she had to admit that, but the smell wasn't all that bad. She had been volleyed back and forth too many times already over this issue and she did not like Mr. Renton. No, she was not going to remove them. If she did, Gretchin knew that she would have to deal with the lecherous Mr. Renton again, and he would no doubt find some puerile excuse to chastise her. The thought made her shudder.

'Could you not remove them?' Carmilla asked sweetly.

Gretchin gasped lowly at the suggestion. Somehow, she had known that the beautiful house guest was going to ask just that. 'I dare not, Miss,' she stated emphatically. 'Mr. Renton said I was not to remove them under any circumstances.'

'Where is Mr. Renton?'

'I don't know, Miss.'

'Thank you, Gretchin.'

Gretchin bowed and Carmilla dismissed the maid and let her return to the lower floor, and Gretchen was glad to go. The garlic flowers must be removed, they were repellent and the stench stung Carmilla's nostrils. They made a fumigating barrier that was difficult to penetrate. She could smell the rank odour filtering under the door. Regardless, Carmilla could not forsake her love; she had to gain access to that room before the vengeful party of men came, and they would come. Carmilla knew she had little time.

Morton diverged from the road and rode through the park, weaving between the trees and galloping through the undulating landscape. It was afternoon now and the daylight was turning grey. Above the distant mountain peaks Morton glimpsed sheets of intermittent lightning. A storm was brewing and the afternoon was darkening. Soon the sun would disappear, and the night would come, and with the night who knew what horrors would crawl from their mouldering tombs. Over a felled tree Morton spurred his horse and the chestnut mare dashed up and onward toward the village. From a short distance, ahead Morton heard hoofs and wheels. He pulled at his reins and his mount veered down an embankment and onto the road. A few metres up the way Mr. Morton came upon a coach and he halted alongside the vehicle. He was surprised to see the General Spielsdorf seated within. The General was leaning on the opened window sill; an older, grey-haired gentleman occupied the seat beside him.

'Why, Mr. Morton!' the General exclaimed in surprise.

'General Spielsdorf!'

Morton was unaware that the General had returned from his visit to Moravia, and he would have liked to have stopped to engage a conversation, but the urgency of his circumstance dictated that he could not.

'Where are you going?'

The General set his lips into a tight and silent line.

'Well, it does not matter for I cannot stop now,' Morton said quickly, turning his horse back into the road. 'I am on my way to fetch the Doctor.' Both the General and his passenger exchanged a knowing look and then Spielsdorf cast his eyes to the rear of the coach. Morton followed their gaze and a young man on a dappled horse approached from behind. It was Ebhardt and he reined in before Mr. Morton.

'The Doctor is with us,' Ebhardt said gravely, and Morton was confused.

Roger Morton could not see the Doctor anywhere in the party, not on horseback nor in the coach. He was baffled but he had no time to play games.

'What?' he questioned and Ebhardt indicated that the gentleman should approach the back of the carriage. Morton guided his mount around the coach. Lashed to the luggage tray was a thing that had once been human, and Mr. Morton could not suppress his horror at the sight. It was the Doctor's body. The corpse was dressed in the shreds that were left of the Physician's garb, and the little magnifying glass that he wore still hung on its golden chain about his mutilated neck. Yet his face had almost been torn away, stripped of flesh, shredded beyond the point of recognition. There was blood everywhere, clotted and scabby and red, splashed all over the remains, yellow bones and teeth poked through the rent skin. The Doctor's limbs hung limp and twisted and his torso and his sex had been savagely mutilated. The vision was sickening. General Spielsdorf beheld Morton's shock but he did not speak and for a moment the whole world fell into complete and utter silence.

Thunder, faint and distal rumbled above the mountains. Aphony strangled the rumbling disquiet and a sense of doom clung to the tiered alpine slopes and the woods. The late afternoon was dying and the waning glimmers of the failing sun were obscured by a phalanx of grey storm cloud. The open vein of the stream in the park flowed on, its ichors turning into dark chrome with the oncoming shadows. The deer and the wolf went into hiding, the owl and the kite flew into secret places. The great oak in the park became a stencilled cut-out against the house mortars; the withered ivy was etched as black veins upon the walls. Even the wind wound down. The new evening was gagged into a suffocating stillness. Emma's room was occluded; two candles were expiring as their wicks simultaneously burned out expelling twin ribbons of curling blue smoke in the air. Emma groaned in her sleep and her hand strayed to the filigree chain and trinket about her neck. Toying absently with the holy symbol she dreamed, not knowing that Renton was watching her from the bedroom door. He looked upon her for a long moment and his eyes were gleaming, and then with a little twitch jumping at the corners of his lips, he stepped out of the room and softly closed the door. Preceded by his shadow he walked slowly up the corridor. His step was quiet and deliberate and when he reached Mademoiselle Perrodon's door he stopped. With a furtive glance, the butler looked about the hallway to check that no one observed and then he went down on his knee.

The Governess thrashed about in her bed. Covered in sweat she writhed in a wild delirium. Her hair was all matted and knotted and her skin was flushed. She had torn away the bosom of her nightdress. Madly she stroked at the hard nipples that tipped her breasts and her face was twisted up into an agony that bespoke only suffering. The sheets were hot upon her skin so she tossed them off, and pulled the skirt of her chemise up to her belly. Caught in a dreaming hallucination in which Carmilla kissed her lips and placed her hand between her thighs, the Governess moaned aloud. The fever gripped her, and she spread her legs, imagining Carmilla's stroke though it was her own caress that probed her depths. Fervour would not let her go, and she mouthed Carmilla's name mutely over and over, even as her fingers trailed embers in the torrid soft folds of her sex. Renton saw, and tried to catch the words the woman moaned, but they were too muffled, so he kept his eye wide and peeped through the keyhole. Eros shot an arrow through to his loins. As he crouched in the hall before the door his own hand strayed to the swollen hardness in his breeches. He licked his lips and put his eye as close to the keyhole as he could, his eyelashes brushing against the brass. Unblinking he continued to watch from the veil of his illicit pleasure, and to try to listen, and soon he observed the Governess twisting around like one being whipped. She pawed at her own flesh and in her final ecstasies she entered the make-believe realm of paradise, climaxing, reaching the ultimate convulsion, and she went limp like a rag doll and buried her head in the pillow. She did not know that Renton had witnessed all. When she had finished Renton smirked.

He felt ambivalent, torn somewhere between lust and aversion because he despised the Governess and her perceived authority but still, although he jested otherwise, he wanted her body. He had imagined silencing her with his member, making her kiss its length, making her groan. That was what these uptight women wanted, the fleshy, hard measure of a man. It would have been so much nicer to lie skin to skin against her dimpled body with the heat of a summer noon blazing upon their flesh. It made for a vivid hallucination but he knew he could never touch that. Renton's eyes had lingered with licentious delight over every movement of her body since the first day she had come to this house as Emma Morton's tutor. He even told himself he despised her flesh, but that was a lie. What a waste was that flesh in that it refused the needs of a man! Such a lovely woman, ripe and supple and not too old for his tastes, and it mattered little that Mademoiselle Perrodon hated him. In fact, the whole thought that she did dislike him amused Renton somewhat, but these women in their closed off seraglio were perhaps a gift from the almighty, even if they were forbidden things, they all craved the serpent slithering in Eden's tree. That was all right, there was no love lost, for the Serpent would slip through the entire parkland of Eden one day, and ruin all the fruit therein. On that day, the fiery hostility might be eased and bliss might inculcate both their bodies… Renton stood up and straightened his clothing, swallowed hard and went downstairs.

In the crepuscular shadows of the new eve the coach jostled along the road that wound alongside the stream. The road rose with the swell of the landscape and continued upward into the clouds. Ebhardt rode his dappled mare at the rear, trailing Mr. Morton's horse on a tether, the Doctor's mount on another. Inside the coach, seated in the richly appointed plush golden velvet and black leather upholstery, the men faced each other and at last General Spielsdorf spoke.

'I have travelled many kilometres to find Baron Hartog.'

The Baron glanced at the General, squinting curiously from under bushy, grey eyebrows. He appeared a bit wild in his countenance, like one world weary, and he sighed as he made reply.

'Very glad I am to make this journey back here with him.' The Baron nodded to Mr. Morton. He had known the General for a long time, even suspected the man's aberrant sexual preferences, but it was not for him to judge. That was a matter for God. A pale ribbon of lightning flashed and the silver light rippled over all three faces, glinting off the buckle of the Baron's old-fashioned hat. Shadows washing through the forest spilled into the carriage. To Morton everything seemed so unreal. The Baron addressed Mr. Morton.

'Though you, as an Englishman, Mr. Morton, will be less aware than we are of the need to seek out these evils immediately and to destroy them. Morton could barely conceal the wrinkle of offence that crossed his face. It was obvious that these two men thought him a fool, a dupe, and ignorant because he came from a world that had always refuted such things. How could one believe it so?

'My sister, Isabella, a girl I loved dearly, one whom I often clasped in fond embrace,' said the Baron, 'was killed by one of these monsters.'

'Killed?'

'As was my Laura,' reiterated the General.

'Part of you still thinks, Mr. Morton that we are dealing with human beings, but that part of you is deluded. Like General Spielsdorf and me, you have been fooled. We are dealing with things that are not human beings at all. Neither are they hallucination. You might even wager that if you blink well enough this horror will have all been but a terrible dream. Alas that is not so. My memory is clear and these spectres, the Karnsteins, are tangible, let me assure you.'

'Then you believe that it true about this family of vampires?'

'I know that it is true.'

'These fiends, they survive on human blood, Mr. Morton. Even as we speak the blood of a young innocent stokes the fire of its unholy existence.' Morton fell silent for a moment, a terrible apprehension billowing up inside his darkened mind. Was that innocent his daughter, Emma? Was something leading her to the valley of death and he not invited! How was such a thing possible?

'You asked where we were going, Mr. Morton,' said the General gravely, 'and now I will tell you, and you can leave us if you wish. Our destination is Karnstein Castle.'

Chapter 13

History Of Evill

In which Baron Hartog relates how he destroyed the fearsome Karnstein family, and how Renton falls under the spell of a seductive malevolence.

As the beautiful girl stood alone in the conservatory she entwined her arms about her breast. She held her own body as if she were embracing herself… protecting herself. She was staring out into the night.

'Mircalla…' the voice called. 'Mircalla…Mircalla.'

She heard the summons and in the summons the demand, but how could she obey either? It was the voice of her father drifting through the ether, and it called her by a name from long, long ago. From a time when she had been alive. Then after that came the call of her mother, both like broken strains of music that issued forth out of the grave, Carmilla wished not to hear either. They sang of guiles and of deceits and their arias were a song of death, commanding her to kill and to flee. Nevertheless, how could she kill the girl she now loved? This love was a hunger that could not be satiated by gorging on lust at one voracious meal. It was in truth a yearning and a need. Herein was a chance to be loved, it was something beyond the hunger, something elusive and tragic that she might never find again. Emotion cracked Carmilla's beautiful countenance into a mask of sadness and she began to sob. She looked up at the clouds that had begun to obscure the moon and the night threw shadows over that lovely visage. A sudden wind broke the stillness and rankled and stirred the leaves in the park. The night was silvered and purple, the clouds gathering over the mountains were of a hue as dark as mulberry and threatening rain. There was thunder in those low clouds, distal and heavy with the promise of a storm. This would be the final night, Carmilla whispered this truth to herself, the last time, and it must be finished. She hugged herself, but there was little comfort to be had in one's own embrace and tears poured down her cheeks. When you were dead there was no one to hold you, no comfort and no lover. Without fail, and always, you wound up alone. To die in love, well that was a dream and such a dream dissipated in the wind. The sound of the dinner gong ringing through the house chased away the whispers but it triggered the dull echo of remorse in her heart. The servants were preparing for dinner, ignorant that the world was abruptly changing or of what Carmilla must now do to protect herself and her love.

The posse crested the hill and the broken turrets of the castle stood out blackly against the opaque sheen of the moon and the purple sky. Mr. Morton had begun to feel the stirrings of unpleasant reservations in the pit of his gut, an awful dread co-mingled with fear, a last warning to flee, to run and never return. He bit down on his lower lip and drew in a long hard breath. General Spielsdorf and Baron von Hartog wore masks of stern authority, and neither of them so much as blinked. Before the space of another thought, as if the building had somehow registered Morton's apprehensions, the carriage rolled to a stop in the ruined courtyard of Karnstein Castle. It halted before the great door that was the entrance into hell and a glacial chill bid the men enter. Above the carved lintel the Karnstein family crest, a golden, beaked hippogryph, opened its maw as if to swallow them whole. Baron Hartog was the first to step down from the carriage and he lighted a lamp and held it aloft. He had passed through that door four decades ago and he knew that it led to a void deeper than the damned soul should ever know, deeper than the descent into Hell It was the mouth of the beast and it mocked the posse of vengeful men, dared them to enter at their own peril and be lost forever. Morton was the second to descend from the coach. He stood in a sea of mist and looked up to the keep's highest turret. There were dead vines choking the mortars and the whisper of crumbling stones and grit seeped into the stale atmospheres as if the building were a beast shifting in its slumbers. Hartog followed his gaze and smiled with a secret knowledge. It had been up there, in that tower, that he had challenged and defeated the beautiful undead.

A deathly silence hung over the castle and although the place seemed as if it were decaying into some lost and dreaming serenity, an unsettling aura clung to its stones, an aura that was beyond death. It was a great grey mass that had held its dominion over the valley for an illimitable age and in its shadow enemies had been challenged, fought and vanquished. Though that was a history written in another time, evil still clung to pinnacle and point. Centuries ago some wily architect applying a talent for sensible geometry had drawn up the lines for the foundations of this edifice. It was blood that had built the feudal towers, the blood of carriers, of carpenters, hodmen and smiths, of stone-breakers and barrow-men, of labourers impressed into service to build the house of their lord. Their masonry had withstood the winters of centuries, but it was the vengeful hands of their ancestors that had eventually razed it into ruin. The higher turrets were obscured in cloud, the walls punctuated with arched windows like eyes blinded. Those windows stared out over the dizzying fall of the wilderness, an undulating wild wood of trees and fog that covered darkling slopes and rock and ravine. With a suppressed shudder Morton cast a hesitant glance over the pointed arches and the high buttresses. He saw that the ashlars façade had been eroded by wind and weather, every line was jagged. The carved mouldings had once boasted minutely detailed mythological scenes and commemorated triumphant battles, but now those details were vague and broken, the valiant history was lost. The capitals, once beautiful and elaborately detailed, were now broken and the battlements were no longer rows of perfect teeth, but shattered and wrecked, the castle's many rooms were devoid and derelict.

Baron Hartog knew of the march of the villagers, of the angry night years ago when the peasantry had stormed the castle, thirsty for revenge, for he had recorded it in the work he had entitled 'History of Evil'. Yet the Baron had also erroneously recorded that although the Karnsteins were cleverly evasive and could not be routed, they could in truth only be destroyed by staking or decapitation. It grieved him now to realise his mistake, for the stake and the sword must be accompanied by the purge of fire. Either method employed singly and not in conjunction with the other would ultimately prove ineffectual. The stake and beheading would give but the semblance of death, and the flame on its own would only reduce the bodies to ashes from which the Karnsteins would reincarnate. The furious peasants on that vainglorious night had ranted and railed and they had foolishly attempted to burn the towers of Castle Karnstein, but their flaming torches were all extinguished, and now as Baron Hartog looked about he saw only the broken futility of the rampage that had ensued. Furthermore, he knew his own injudicious mistake. He cursed aloud and spat upon the floor, and so to light the way to cleansing the countryside of Stiria for once and for always he guided this party of gentlemen with the beam of his lamp. By its golden glimmer all three men passed through that great gaping door only half-understanding what awaited them within.

Inside the castle Morton strained his eyes through the gloom. Coal-dyed eddies rippled in the mist that curled all the way up to the vaulted ceilings. It was chill within the chateau; a glacial cold swirled about the men and then it rushed upward into the spaceless heights. The icy draft touched Morton's cheek with a cold caress. He flinched at the frost and peered up into the vast high darkness. Vaguely, he could just make out row upon row of sculpted arches hewn into the smooth stone, their carved details disappearing as the view surrendered to black. These calcified terraces were riven with what must have been spectacular mouldings, but they were steeped in shadows. Raised galleries were punctuated by stairs and endless corridors that seemed to branch off into nowhere. Filaments of watery light showed through the slender apertures of loopholes, narrow slits high above in the gloom girded by circular stairs that ascended to infinity and possibly even beyond.

Heavy beams and high transverse ribs interlocked to hold the titanic structure upright and rigid in an everlasting and steadfast embrace, proof against the purifying force of fire's astonishment. This great house seemed so much bigger when one stepped within its walls, for everywhere the eye could perceive the dim spaces expanded above into the firmament or below into an abyss of vast distances that belied reality. Morton heard the clattering echo of his own footsteps and had to admit that he was afraid. Upon every wall, the long dead Karnsteins glared from gilded frames and Morton could have sworn that some of those black eyes had moved and that they watched with a cold malignancy every step they took. Baron Hartog gave a sardonic smile as he walked calmly and slowly ahead of the other two men.

'I was determined to avenge the death of my sister,' he told them. 'I knew where these monsters sprang from and what had to be done to rid the world of them.'

In his mind's eye, he was with his pretty sister Isabella, long, long ago. She was still a child and had not yet reached her fifteenth year. They were seated in the parlour, sharing the velvet settee. Isabella had retired from her music lesson. She had been singing, a sweet tune, as thrilling in her pitch as is the thrush wooing its amour. When she had ceased and smiled she had sat beside her brother and had placed her head in his lap. Hartog recalled stroking her ebony locks, plaiting those strands of midnight, and how he had been intoxicated by their obsessive perfume. He had kissed the young woman on her cheek, stroking her velvet skin, tasting the dolour of regret and loss in the salt of his own tears. She had been so beautiful and had died so young. Hartog forced the memory deeper and locked it away. Looking up to the gallery and the twisting stairs that led to the tower he saw himself standing upon the lip of eternity. Hartog's sword had glinted chrome in the moonlight on that night, and beyond its sparkling sheath he had watched in fascinated awe as the shrouded entity had approached. It had come to reclaim its shroud, for without that veil it could not rest in the spoiled confines of its grave. As if it had been a thing alive, the shroud had slithered from his grasp and snaked across the flagstones, and the monster had held out a hand and the cerement had twined with the rest of its funeral garb. Peeling away, veil by veil, the demon had revealed itself.

'However, face to face,' Hartog whispered, 'my limbs seemed paralysed. I prayed to God to give me back their strength.' He remembered how the thing had come forward, stepped from its cerecloths with arms outstretched, inviting an embrace. The smell of midnight and heliotrope had wafted heady from its undead flesh. The Baron paused in his memory and placed his lamp upon a dusty table. A candle tree upon that table had run into a river of wax, spiders had spun a tapestry of lace from candle to wall, silken threads from arch to ceiling, sagging with dust. He watched a spider scuttle nimbly away from the intrusive light of the lamp. Hartog closed his eyes for a second and his lips trembled. In that moment, so long ago he had gone weak, as if all the strength of his manly body had been drained, as if his vital essences were all but diluted. The visions tortured his memory through a screen of fog. The revenant had come up before him, its skin white, and its flaxen hair wafting and spun of wispy silk. As lovely as Aphrodite in all her Hellenic splendour it had brushed its body against his body.

'I was transfixed,' he related, as if in this admission he knew the greatest and foulest of any shame, 'and when the moment came I could not move.' A frisson had clawed away at his skin and even now, all these years later, he still felt cold. Reliving the moment of sheer and abject terror made his veins clot with ice. In his eye Hartog once again beheld the curve of her form, the swell of her bosoms, and the partly obscured triangle of her sex.

'That moment has been a nightmare all my life.' Baron Hartog confessed, and he knew that it had also been a nightmare of guilty longing that he scarce could admit to any man alive. The Baron turned and faced the General and Mr. Morton. 'I was saved by a cross I wore,' he said, and his fingers strayed to his chest. On a leather thong about his neck hung the same holy symbol that had precluded his death all those years ago. The cross glinted aureate and ebony in the lamplight. Hartog shuddered and closed his eyes. 'As it touched the vision of beauty that confronted me I...' Recalling the moment when his cross had branded the milky skin of the vampire's naked breast, the nobleman faltered. 'I felt a shock of evil!' he exclaimed and his eyes sprang open and he stared wildly into the dark. 'Thank God in his mercy that he gave power to my arm!'

Once again, he felt his fingers tangle in the demon's hair and pull back, pull hard. He saw the snapping jaws and the dreadful, poisoned dripping teeth, and he saw his sword describing a silver arc through the mist and the tide of crimson blood that had spurted from the torso and sprayed his face in a shower of clotted ruby. As he cut the creature's head clean from its shoulders its body had sagged and fallen at his feet, his boots sticky with gore. He had stood insensible for a long time, still holding the head by its yellow tresses, until finally with a cry of horror he had flung it from his clutch and dropped his sword.

'It was a woman!' declared Morton in utter surprise and horror, as if such a thing could not have been possible. For him women were things of pleasure, not power.

Baron Hartog looked upon him and his eyes gleamed.

'A very beautiful woman,' he responded and a clap of thunder rang out above the mountain.

She had dressed in her blue silk and posed in the parlour, her legs comfortably crossed, her hands folded in her lap. Carmilla's skin radiated a corona of soft gold and her lips glistened like garnets. With a gentle smile, she looked upon Renton as he set the tea service on the table near her seat.

'I think I will sit with Miss Emma for a while,' she told him, and her eyes shone with the colour of the sea where its deeps are sky-dyed.

'Yes, Miss,' the butler replied courteously, but it was difficult not to stare at the girl. She was so beautiful, thought Renton, the sight of her made his eyes ache. How could he gaze upon that creamy skin and not be humbled? Oh, to lie amid that tumble of auburn hair, to clasp the curves that shaped her voluptuous body, the breasts about to escape from the flimsy bodice! Renton took a deep breath and thought it best if he left the girl to her evening refreshment. As he turned he saw his reflection in the mirror and he saw hers too, and her lips were pouting and she tossed the great mane of her hair to one side. The butler stepped forward briskly, for he needed a fast exit. There was nothing that could stop his thoughts of having the girl, right there in the parlour, on the sofa.

'Oh, Renton,' she called after him. Renton paused and gulped and slowly turned around.

'Yes, Miss?'

'I wonder if you could have those garlic flowers removed.' Carmilla's eyes strayed briefly upward, indicating the direction of Emma's room. She spoke lowly, her voice controlled, but there was a husky and seductive quality to it that suggested half-concealed allure. 'They upset Miss Emma,' she added with concern, and her big eyes became even bigger.

'I am sorry, Miss, I cannot do that. The Doctor was most insistent.'

Carmilla feigned a puzzled countenance.

'That seems silly,' she ventured, and was possessed of the attitude of one who truly could not comprehend the mystery. 'They have a horrid smell!' She shook her head and simpered. 'You would not wish to cause Miss Emma discomfort, would you?' Renton looked at her and he grit his teeth. Of course, this girl was correct in her observation, but his priority went beyond that triviality.

'I am sorry, Miss. I cannot move them.'

'Why not?' Carmilla continued to press her concerns. 'Why are they there?'

She leaned forward in her chair, straightening her back and pushing up her bosoms, one hand played with the filaments of her hair.

'I am sorry, Miss,' Renton replied hoarsely, his blood thrumming hotly in his veins. 'I cannot explain.'

'Why not?' Carmilla insisted. She stood up and demurely dropped her gaze to her feet. The girl moved forward then, sinuous and sensual, gliding softly up to the butler to stand before him and look him directly in the eye. 'I am not a child.'

Renton could not restrain his tongue from licking his lips. Carmilla smiled.

'You are in some things, Miss,' he assured Carmilla, but she had read his thoughts even before their sounding had left his lips.

'What things?'

In her face, if Renton had only been able to see, he might have read the truth that Carmilla knew more than he could ever know and that his fate was sealed. She laughed softly at his words and gently tossed back her lovely head. Fire glinted sparks from the jewel about her slender neck. Renton was fighting the compulsion to hold her and to kiss her and she was teasing him, he knew it. Boldly he grasped her by the shoulders, his fingers at last feeling the cool velvet of her almond flesh and her eye travelled to his hand and then back to his face.

'It would be best if you kept away from Miss Emma's room,' he advised soberly, 'and from Mademoiselle Perrodon.' A flicker of bewilderment passed its shadow over Carmilla's lovely and flawless face.

'Why Mademoiselle Perrodon?' she asked, and Renton squeezed her shoulders even harder, but she did not flinch.

'She is a wicked woman...' the butler decreed and then added, 'if she is human!' Carmilla appeared horrified, as if she had finally realised she might be in some perilous danger.

'You don't mean...'

'Yes, Miss,' Renton assured, his words cutting off her sentence before she had finished speaking.

'Oh, no!' the girl exclaimed, and in a fit of feigned terror she threw herself upon Rento's chest, upon his shoulder, into his arms. He could not repress the abrupt swelling of his member as she pressed hard against him, and Renton was lost for the feminine maneuvering of man's lust is changeless. Carmilla moved her fair head upon his shoulder and pushed her thighs into the butler's body. She smiled inwardly as she heard his sharp intake of breath. Groaning he fumbled with her body, not knowing what to hold, what to touch, the silk of her dress sliding over the satin of her skin, and her scent intoxicated him. In a feeble and transparent move to sooth her trembling, Renton began to stroke her hair, but Carmilla was victorious in her deception and she calculated his destruction, squirming against him and raising her sweet mouth to the lobe of his ear. Gently she bit the flesh, and then sucked on it and Renton's sex almost burst and expelled his vital essence. With difficulty he held back, and pulled her head away, and their lips met in a violently passionate kiss. Renton was fervid in his embrace, pawing at the girl's skin, his coarse grasp raking at her. In response Carmilla let her tongue slip between his teeth and as she kissed deeply her eyes glazed over and she stared beyond his shoulder and into the dark realm of the damned.

'Gentlemen, I have told you of the beautiful vampire and how I had chopped off her head.' Baron Hartog stared gravely into the dark spaces of the castle and momentarily pondered the shifting shadows. That slice of tormented memory had never left him and its memory had haunted his dreams for the last forty years. 'It must perplex you somewhat, the notion that the dead can walk, so let me relate to you in a little more detail how that night came about. You must understand that the enemies I sought were no ordinary mortals.' Hartog picked up his lamp and moved slowly beneath the malevolent eyes of the portraits of the long dead Karnsteins. The painted faces seemed to glower at him, seething for revenge.

'They were murderers from beyond the grave,' he continued, raising an eye to the face of a decadent dark-haired portrait. The lamplight glowed upon a young man's handsome face. 'For this ruined castle where I lay in wait had once been the home of the Karnstein family. On that night, long ago, climbing this craggy peak to the chateau, accessible only by that now unused and partly overgrown road that brought us here, I came with intent to this ruin, their malignant ancestral abode. Its walls, as you see, are of granite and stand over a metre thick, and although an eon ago it fell into greater disrepair, when the common people stormed its grated portcullis and razed it into devastation, the structure still could not be obliterated. Slate and blue-grey are the layers of the mountainous backdrop that sprawls beyond its stony turrets and secure on its eagle's perch this castle watches over the night and it might never fall. It stands as a protectorate of all the black secrets that were whispered within its thick and mortared walls, but let it be here stated that such protection did not afford the Karnstein lineage the Lord's ultimate salvation. Unlike mortal man who is free to accept grace and to do good deeds and to die in peace, they were evil and therefore damned and thus denied redemption.

'They were the servants of Satan and partook of every vice that wealth and power could tender. They were all evil in life, and remained evil after death. Theirs is a history of evil, a chronicle recorded in bright crimson blood. Throughout their entire reign the Karnsteins were known to have worshipped the Devil, offered the Lord of the Damned blood sacrifices in homage for dark blessings. It is believed that these demons possess the power to resurrect, to come back from the dead. Some of their loathsome breed had even mastered the necromantic lore and given over their souls in favour of the dark life perpetual. By mine own experiences can I vouchsafe this is true, and by the end of this night you, General Spielsdorf, and you, Mr. Morton, both of you will have incontrovertible proof that what I declare is not fallacy.

'The beautiful vampire I decapitated was both spectral vapour and a semblance of actual flesh and blood! These fiends have the power to return from the tomb, to reincarnate. They come among humankind in cycles, like a beast that has been hibernating and awakens with thirst and hunger. When they do re-emerge they forcibly erupt from their coffins, sometimes as a column of mist, sometimes by clawing their way out of the ground, but they always take on palpable form. When they visit among the living they prey upon fresh blood. No door or barrier is proof against them once they have been given invitation to cross the threshold of the living, and they are hungry, voraciously hungry, starved for the human essence and starved for carnal desires. I had learned that the only way to release the vampire from its earthly bonds was to drive a stake through its heart or to decapitate the monster, and I thank my sainted Grandmother, Dorkó, for that knowledge.

'That night, avenging Isabella, I disinterred their bodies. One by one I dug down deep into their graves and did what had to be done. As you can see, the castle's graveyard sprawls adjacent to the west tower, desolate and ghostly in the dark, its rows of grave and mausoleum might appear to be the dominion of broken and limbless funereal statuary and little else, but that is a deception. On that dreadful evening forty years ago I was a hunter in this haunted realm, galvanised by a terrible excitement that made my heart race and the blood to thrum in my veins. I had travelled many kilometres, from afar Moravia, through many change of horses and spent many days in the saddle, passing between river and mountain before entering the province of Stiria. It was with difficulty that I learned of my intended destination, for the peasants that I met, always on guard against calamity, wished not to divulge the location of Castle Karnstein in fear that they would be visited by evil. For them the great house was a byword, a place that did not exist and they turned away their eyes and dropped their voices and made the sign of the cross whenever the appellation left my lips. For their fears were real. When they did release their tongues and whisper lowly they spoke only of darkness and of death, and how violence had returned to their region after many years of slumber. These simple folks lived in fear, for the malevolence had come among them again and it now whetted its appetite again upon their blood.

'You must remember Mr. Morton that the Karnsteins were nobility corrupt and that to rise against and to attempt to destroy them seemed futile for it would risk the most awful punishment. Women and children would have been mercilessly slaughtered, their homes wiped out. You see, their way of life had been the way of things for centuries, the villagers were the fodder of the Karnsteins, their serfs, and they were kept in line with power and fear. Perhaps you have heard of a similar noble, a Prince of Walachia, a 'Boyer', who fought against the Ottomans, a warlord 'Vlad Țepeș', who was so feared by his minions that he ruled absolute. His reign too was one of bloodshed and ignominy, but contrary to popular myth, although he belonged to the 'Order of the Dragon', he was a living man and unlike the devilish Karnsteins, he died in battle. It is rumoured that Vlad was buried but returned from the grave, and perhaps this is true for his tomb was discovered empty, yet the power and the principles of his ghastly reign and that of the Karnstein family are horribly similar.

'Both have become comingled in history and legend, and perhaps they are directly related by blood. God and State seemed to have deserted the common man when the name Karnstein fell from one's lips. Even the Emperor himself turned a deaf ear upon the bucolic populace, and so the Karnsteins, that once great and powerful family had taken a deliberate and willful departure from the divine, and in so doing they had spurned God and seeded the most dreadful germ of wickedness upon the world. The peasants came to believe that it was to invite certain death to even speak of them, and like Vlad, no one dared rise against them for fear that they too would be eternally damned. Neither sympathy nor gold could loosen the peasant tongues.

'One mist-strangled day, over a week into my search, I had put my horse to stable and took a meal at a tavern in the village of Karnstein. Under a garland of purple garlic flowers, and in the gleam of a silver cross nailed to the wall, I sat with the inn keeper's son. Having introduced myself to the young man and stated my mission, he told me that his name was Kurt and that his father would turn me out if he knew of my quest in seeking the castle of the Karnsteins. It was with difficulty that I elicited any information from the young man at all and it took some doing, but after a while I managed to secure his partial confidence. '

'My vengeance,' I said unto the young man 'is driven by a vehement passion for justice. I wish no harm to anyone, but I need information and perhaps you can help me. Tell me please, where am I to find the ruins of Karnstein castle, for it must be hereabouts?'

'Although Kurt's dialogue amounted to few words, his eyes were wide with terror, but after much coercion he told me that on the edge of the town I would come upon a rutted path, and that path led to a neglected road that disappeared into the forests and wound high up the lofty mountain. He had taken me roughly by the arm and drawn me to the inn door and flung it open and had pointed skyward. His finger had stabbed fearfully at the air, at a vague and phantom shape within the cloudy morning mists above the hamlet. 'There!' he had exclaimed, 'that is where you must go.' Even as he spoke the veil of fog had drawn apart to reveal a crumbling ruin towering like Babel upon the hill. It was as if the revelation was intended for my eyes alone, like a divine sign that disclosed for me the terrible place to which I must go and the destiny that drove me forward. It is truth that I shuddered upon beholding the spectacle of the ruin, and I recalled that I asked him if he might offer to be my guide, but he fervently declined. Kurt intimated bluntly that I should give up my quest for fear of my life and turning away had wished me good fortune and the blessing of God. Yet before he left my side he muttered that even God himself was not likely to save me if I went up there. 'People do not go up there,' he told me, 'and if they do they never come back.' Anxious, but determined to advance, I watched him shrink away and thanked him and turning he nodded his head. 'I understand your need for vengeance,' he then uttered, 'though talk no more of your passion, but rather cling to your faith and hope. Perhaps that is all that might save you. May the light of heaven guide you now and see you safely to your mission.' There it was that I left young Kurt, at the inn, and with a heavy heart, and thinking long upon his words, I took that road he had described leading all the way up to the sky vault. I walked for an hour or two, and as the day drew to its end, as the sky drained from blue to mulberry and then to pitch did I climb the final precipice upon which Castle Karnstein hulked.

'The moon arose and shone like a cool blue coin in the new night sky. By its steely light I found my path, treacherous though it was, and it led me trembling in my flesh to stand before the unnatural barriers of the grave. The castle of the Karnstein family stood unrepaired by the ravages of time, and against its walls the storm beat and the wind blew through the traceries, cut through the remnants of broken picture glass, chilling frozen the spirit of faith. As I entered the castle courtyard I shook for fear at what I had to do. The thick mists were chill and damp and curled about my thighs, the breath of the dragon seeped under my breeches and cloak, making my skin clammy and damp. The great oaken door presented itself before me like a ravenous mouth; a maw that once entered must surely swallow me whole and obliterate my existence from the world. Groaning on rusty hinges the heavy door gave way and opened inward. In the dim light, I breached its interior dark, no one, not a single living creature did I encounter, for no living being had disturbed the silence in this place for those long forsaken forty years. The sound of my forced entry reverberated in the dark like a mocking cry and I paused, frozen and stilled, motionless for the passing of several heartbeats. At length, when the last resonance had died I eased the door closed behind me and thrust the iron bolt secure before I entered the chapel. Within was a stagnant world enwrapped in a pall of moribund shadow. My footfalls were stifled echoes in the silence, my path lit by a flickering torch, a blazing beam that I held high, and it cast an orange lambency into the dark, throwing a parody of my terrified shadow upon the cold stones. Fervidly my eyes strained in the dimness. By the torchlight I saw halberd and spear and I glimpsed the remnants of tattered pennants that drooped listlessly above my head. Rusted gisarme, dulled axes and armoury littered the floor. As I have said, the castle, including this deconsecrated chapel had long ago been destroyed by a past insurrection, an uprising that now saw its floors bestrewn with debris.

'Broken pews were piled one against the other, a golden cross and a golden chalice lay upon the altar, the cross inverted, the cup overturned and spun with cobwebs. Spider's silk festooned every wall and every arch. A great suspended wheel depended on a chain over my head, its candelabra hanging tilted and from fractured spokes rivers of frozen wax were stalactites that had ceased dripping in the tainted air. From this wheel threads of dusty silk trailed a fragile connecting bridge to the filthy surface of a great oak table. The floors exuded damp and the strangling vine choked the columns, every broken piece of furniture, every tarnished plate and goblet thrown about the floor, every rotten parchment and tapestry bore witness to that past and brutal conflict. There were many portraits here too, lining the halls and the walls, some straight and some at angles, some slashed and torn, some worm eaten, but all were faces that looked down with cruel eyes. All those eyes were dark and haughty eyes, and soulless. These were the Karnstein family ancestors, men and women, young and old, captured prisoner in the perimeters of dully gilded frames. Mould spores palpitated in the damp and had begun to fleck those faces; grime had settled like sediment and disfigured many of the painted visages. The mould had begun to feast upon painted cheek and brow and mouth, and its canker somehow described the virulent and potent evil that had festered within each Karnstein heart. To this grim castle I had ventured alone, and amid the litter of past centuries, under the ghastly watch of those time haunted faces, I cleared my path, hurling aside worm-rotten timbers and rusted armoury.

'Even as I did this I threw a nervous eye over my shoulder. I could feel the dark rising boldly at my back, a cold and clinging pervasive sense of fear taunting me, and it found me imagining that the dark reached out with frozen fingers to claw at my skin and to fill me with dread. Moments passed, and under the narrow and cruel surveillance of those cruel and ancient faces I ascended the stairs that wound about and constricted the throat of the tower. Upon reaching the gallery I gave the flame of my torch to another and placed the one I carried in a sconce. The waxy moon glowed in the dark firmament as it sailed all the way to the blinking stars, and by its light I watched from the ruined tower. Looking down I could even see the road as it snaked up through the forest, and I could see the village square and the lights in the tavern. My eyes had then fervently scanned the graveyard, that netherworld of slanted headstones and sculptured Seraphim, searching, watching.

'Silver-blue glanced off the sheath of my sword, sparked like a winking star in the cold black onyx surface of the ring on my finger. That finger traced a line over the hilt of my blade, and to still the beating of my heart I remember taking a deep breath and then taking another. Down there, in the graveyard where the trees clung to a half-life in the shadows, their branches skeletal and their roots rotten in the ground, something stirred. Like a vibration, like a ripple in a pond, across the sea of mist the wind blew, swirling the fog into roils of undulating translucent waves. The mist washed over velvet mosses and thick lichen and veiled the marble façades of decrepit mausoleums.

'Suppressing a shudder, I remember that I pulled my cloak tighter about my body, but not so much as to keep warm but to reassure myself in my fear. How grim was the deed I had set out to do, and yet contrarily how alive I felt, alive and goaded by defiance despite the peril? For I knew that I was not alone in this chateau, not alone as we the living define the concept of being alone, for the Karnstein scourge still haunted its ruin and I could feel its presence, palpable and real. I knew that at certain times, their evil spirits could thrust out from their mouldering tombs and take on a kind of human shape, to roam the countryside and seek for victims to satisfy their need, their passion, their thirst for blood. Down there, under the wreckage of a lightning struck tree, I saw a phantasm emerge from its grave! A frisson passed through my flesh as I watched on both fascinated and horrified.

'In the cold and sterling moonlight, I beheld a thread of mist as it leaked from a fissure in the stone. At first the misty essence rose slowly, but as it gathered force, like a tidal swell, like a plume of deepest grey it streamed faster and thicker and deeper and blacker. As if from a cauldron the vapour poured forth, vomiting in a geyser above the tomb, and jetting upward it coalesced into a swirling column that seemed to spark with flecks of star fire. Those tiny flickers were of yellow and ruby and they whirled round and round, revolving and spinning in rapid circles. How they danced and crackled with galvanic energy, churned and swept along, propelled by a fountain spewed forth by some convulsive upheaval of the earth. Dust coalesced into shape and substance within that smoky, boiling cloud and the hand of gravity compressed and moulded a form from the dead clay. Like pictures caught and revolving in a rapidly flickering wheel of light I beheld the vision as fancy. Fear and expectation inflamed my mind and I cannot be certain of what form it truly assumed, but as the plume thickened and boiled faster and faster so did it begin to solidify and become substance. When the last sparks extinguished and the column of vapour had dissipated, there stood a figure draped from head to foot in the cerements of the tomb. The revenant shuddered in its grave clothes and its illusory shape rippled in the shadows.

'Lit by the blue-tinged moonbeams and in the guise of a hideous and faceless Salome, the creature slowly turned about, as if performing the first hesitant steps of a weird dance and as it turned it shrugged off a thin and gauzy veil. The veil fell listlessly to the ground, into the tide of fog, falling in slow motion, coiling and slithering as a serpent slithers, collapsing into an undulating pile beside the grave stone. There it might have become all but lost unto my vision, had I not marked the spot with my eye, shivering even as I felt for the handle of my sword. Although it had dropped a veil of crepe the thing was still enveloped in the cerements of the grave, and before its winding sheet had kissed the earth the thing moved off into the concealing mist. It floated as if it did not tread its foot upon the ground, and rapidly disappeared.

'My eyes were wide with fear and my throat had run dry, and although my first instinct was trepidation it was blind panic that both goaded me to run and demanded that I not flee. Yet how I wished that I had never set foot in that place, for truly, I could have fled and foregone my vengeance, yet I knew that I must not fail in my mission, not when my beloved sister lay dead in her grave and these demons were free to find new victims.

'You will find, Mr. Morton, that I had hoped that anyone reading my 'History of Evil' would be warned by my own misfortune. By its veracity I declare the legitimacy of that work, and I hope I can make you understand that which is almost unbelievable. Few realise that the vampire does not always strike and kill with speed. For sometimes it is the nature of the demon to court its victim, as it did with Isabella, savouring its enjoyment, and at other times its feral bloodlust would cause it to strangle and exhaust at a single feast. If only for the loving memory of Isabella I had to cling to my courage that night and fortunate was I to have read, prompted by my Grandmother, some ancient tracts that had described such demoniac visitations. Without that knowledge, I would surely have been killed. Praise is to the Lord that he armed me with the knowledge, with the stake and the sword and that I did not falter in my intended purpose. I knew from my readings that the demon on its rampage would quickly kill to sate its vile hunger, kill and feast as a glutton feasts, and I knew the spectre, when satiated would return to its grave. I also knew that without the shroud in which it was interred to cloak its festering body, there could be no night of rest for any vampire!

'I left my post guided by the faint illumination cast by the orange plume of my torch. How the shadows writhed over my cheek and splashed up the rough stone wall, rehearsing the emotional pain and the physical agony of the ghastly melodrama that was to come. At the base of the tower I did not pause, there could not be allowed one moment of hesitation or all would be lost and my vengeance would be as nothing. Quickly I descended the gallery and when I reached the great oaken panel of the entrance my trembling fingers closed about the long bolt. Thrusting the bolt aside again took all the strength in my arm, and placing my shoulder against the door I heaved and pushed until the portal gave with a groan and opened onto the night. I can only tell you that it was God who guided me through the mist to that place from whence the thing had emerged. With a cold thrill in my heart I stood above the grey stone slab of its grave, that spot beneath the gnarled tree that I had marked in my vision.

'By now the moon had shifted in its transverse journey through the night sky, moved higher and shone less blue, but aided by its pallid light I had found that grave and the shroud. The cerement lay coiled beside the stone, half concealed by the undulating vapours, and it glimmered and sparkled as if it were sprinkled over with chips of diamond, writhing sluggishly with a preternatural life of its own. It was with repulsion and loathing that I reached forward to touch the thing, moving as it did in volute and sinuous waves like some horrible serpent. I stooped beneath the blackened tree, under an overhanging branch and extended my clutching fingers. Volts of white heat leapt from the shroud to my flesh and the moment that I seized the fabric was the moment a thrill electric shivered through my body. The cerecloth seemed wet and clotted with mucus, as if it had been spewed from a rotting throat, like a feline throws up a hair ball, and it resisted my grasp, unfurling and twisting up again in a wind about my wrist and arm. I gasped and pulled at it, my fingers slippery with liquescence, and hastily I lashed the grave rag into dripping knots, a tie that would hold it fast and perhaps bide me a little more time. Frantically I called out both upon Dorkó, the Baba Yaga, for help and guidance, and prayed to God's angels to forgive me as I tied the knots, and whether they heard my plea above the violent roar of the blood through my veins I cannot say. For was not the practice of such magic to be considered in defiance of my own faith in God? There was no time though to consider this tortured thought, for if God did disapprove of my lingering heathen teachings then it would be God who punished me, though yet was I certain that it was his righteous hand that guided now mine own. Clumsily I managed the deed of knotting the veil, knowing that my time was short, and as I corded the unearthly material I uttered a broken invocation to the Lord to forgive my profane magic and quicken my fingers and render the shroud limp. Hastily I ran back to the tower and the stairs and the loophole overlooking the darkness of the cemetery and the benighted village below, wreathed in fog.

'Aglow in the moonlight I drew forth a spyglass, and through it I saw the distorted arc of the rustic buildings. The houses seemed to overhang and lean toward each other, and almost to touch where eave nudged roof, and the public buildings, inn, bakery and smith were oriented toward the castle view. The tiny hamlet huddled about a central fountain. That cistern flowed with fresh water from the mountain streams and lakes and quietly, musically, it plashed over the cool stones. In the square, I could see terracotta planters and trimmed shrubs and above the shop fronts flower pots decorated window boxes that in summer must have bloomed with sprays of pansy and violet and gerbera. Faint lights were flickering in the tavern windows. The streets of the town climbed in tiers and the smooth, cart-worn pavers winding about the steps lead past the last cottage and stopped where the shadows disappeared into the dark. Then, in the pale moonbeams, I watched on as the lanes began to fill with a sea of fog. The vapours covered the cobbles and poured like smoke along the ground. The mist swirled and boiled, an unstoppable and vaticinal courier announcing a black and biblical Passover.

'Into that ocean of undulating translucent vapour a twitching, pulsing and shrouded shape emerged, its cerements immaterial, rising and falling palpitate upon the misty tide. Down there, far below, I was sure I glimpsed a vaguely human shape, but the image of face and limb and eye were distant and fleeting, and the figure was sublimated, floating and buoyant. There was no solidity to this being and it traversed the cobbled streets with speedy step, for the dead travel fast, its shrouds billowing in a storm of unrest. All the noises of the night were smothered in its passing; all animal sounds choked off, no dog howled, no night bird called and no mournful lowing issued from the stable stalls. The only noises were the faint sounds of accordion and of cheer that issued from the tavern. It would have been good to think that safety and happiness and hearty cheer might be shared in the tavern, but such companionship was but a few steps divided from terror. The polished eye of my spyglass revealed a shape, filtering into the street, the spectre of death. From where I stood, perched upon the hill, I swear I could almost hear the muted sounds of those voices from the inn, the sounds of men and women laughing, of ale being poured, and I imagined that I felt the warmth of the fire that must have blazed in the grate. It was distant and low but I was certain that I could hear the faint strains of a light ditty played on an accordion. In terror one imagines strange things, but it was an odd comfort to believe that I shared a pint of ale with the farmer, the smith and the cobbler, that I enjoyed a warm social evening among friends. In the warm but suffused glow of the fire and the orange tongues of bracketed candles I imagined that I laughed with a pretty tavern wench and that she was throwing back her head and laughing merrily with me.

'The landlord would be pouring a beer for a farmer smoking a pipe, and he would be shaking his head at the young man who has had one ale too many and must therefore answer the call of nature. I say with certainty that like any man, even one in his clouded senses, the youth might pause to notice the creamy whiteness of the tavern girl's skin and the low cut of the bosom of her dress. Like any man he would marvel at the full roundness of her breasts. With a broad and silly smile, he must totter by her curvy form, patting a friend knowingly on the shoulder, winking in her direction as he moves toward the door and exits. She might tease him with a smile. Perhaps, if he is lucky, the later evening shall find him sharing her bed. However, the moment tore me back from my reverie and the reality was that I watched from a high post and I waited in the dark, my nerves all twisted up with a dreadful suspense. I saw the tavern door close upon the chatter and on the warm light. Outside, in the night, under the pale lighted lamp the young man loosened his belt and hose. His fingers freed his member and he began to make water. Along the inn façade, just over the young man's shoulder a shadow wavered in the moonlight, a shadow that had sprung up out of the dark. I wanted to cry out a warning but I knew I would not possibly be heard, and even if I were I would have sealed my own doom and my mission would be wasted. The shade appeared to shiver into shape and form, but it was vague and shrouded, with draped arms outstretched, clawing with ghostly fingers. It reached forward and I glimpsed the blackness caress the young man's cheek. I looked on helplessly as the two figures blended, as it undid the hooks in his shirt front and peeled back the coarse linen, stroked his skin. He appeared to acquiesce without protest. Brushing against his nipple the shade stroked the young man's chest, and then the stroke went lower and hovered above the now rigid shaft of his exposed sex. In the ghastly moonlight, I thought I saw the ghostly floating white thing coalesced about his groin, servicing him with red, red lips. In ecstasy, the swain shuddered and then I glimpsed the pale smudge of his face as he looked up and for a moment that face was blank, unrecognising his peril, even as he gaped in his wonder a torrent of scarlet spurted up the wall and surged hotly over the cold cobbled stones. I threw aside my telescope and I shuddered in the scant safety of the tower, and I waited for the thing to return from its darkling scourge.

'The next morning, after my ordeal, when I came down from the castle and returned to the village, Kurt, the landlord's son, told me all. He said that the young tavern wench, she who had taken a sip of ale with the young man, had now gone into shock and become mute. Where once her eyes had been twinkling, there was no twinkle to be seen in them now. Her lips, once so sweet, were now without lustre and the braid of her yellow hair that used to shine in the sunlight, was now coarse. After that night, she now lives in fear of her own shadow. She was everyone's sweetheart, everyone's merriment, laughing at a joke or two and not embarrassed by the touch of the drunken men who fumbled at her voluptuous curves. Kurt recalled waking from his pallet at the sound of the scream. Terrified, he had run to be with his father. He remembers seeing that everyone in the tavern had frozen in their places, like statues, and all faces were turned toward the door. The accordion player had ceased playing; even the blue smoke from another man's pipe had dissipated in the air. For the space of a heartbeat no one had dared move, and then the door had reverberated with a dreadful crash and the young woman had cried out. Kurt remembered the fear in his own father, for he felt the terror pulsing through the burly man's fingertips as they held him fast by the arm. Kurt told me in earnest that he had leapt toward the door but his father had held him back. The girl had sprung up from her seat and thrust aside the foolish men. It is with shame that Kurt recalled that all those men let her go to the door alone. From the dark, on the other side of that door they had heard a ghastly cacophony, a sound the like of which none of them ever wished to hear again, a trembling, wild thrashing that pounded against the sturdy oak.

'There had been something animalistic and savage in the noise, a beastly snarling, and a tearing of fabric all mixed up with a strangled, gasping shriek. Terrified the girl had thrown back the latch and pulled on the door, and it had swung inward revealing the young man. Filling the door frame his body had appeared suspended as if in air, his fingers clawed, his face twisted into a mask of agony. From neck to waist his shirt had been ripped in twain, and there was blood, so much blood pouring down his chest that it had spilled like a red fountain from beneath his chin. The red had pumped out and sprayed the wall, the door, the girl's cheek, and it had spattered over the milky skin of the wench's bosom and run between her breasts. Before the victim had slumped and pitched forward, Kurt said he went pale with shock, and that he had beheld the man tumbling like a dead puppet into the girl's embrace. The final horror had been the sight of the man's head jerking and twisting and hanging from the rent stump of his mutilated throat. Kurt said that the girl had shrieked and shrieked and would shriek thereafter in her nightmares for all the days of her life.

'Perhaps, considering this horror, you men might believe that I had been a fool in thinking that my thirst for revenge was equal to the true nature and power of the scourge that is vampirism. Let me assure you that in truth I did not act in vanity, but I told my heart that if I held fast I might yet emerge triumphant, and in so doing I would have purged the earth of this abomination and saved many lives in the doing. So now the moment of reckoning had come upon me and yet I knew that I had crossed the precipice and could never turn back. Vengeance is a terrible master and its dictates bind you as slave to its need. My vengeance against this evil would be done but it alone would not suffice to end the terror, there was much more foul work to be accomplished. I had sworn by my sister's death that none, not one of these monsters should escape my wrath this night, and driven by this violent lust. My heart pounded with apprehension as I watched the creature search around its grave. Into the sea of mist, it poured, pausing by the lightning struck tree as it sought and it hunted, bending and turning circles, confused and growing agitated as it could not find its cerements. With splayed arms and invisible flesh, it raked at the maelstrom of vapours that roiled around it, writhed obscenely in the whorls of a cold storm, but alas for misfortune it did not find its dropped veil. It crouched as a feral cat crouches and as it did this, I offered unto God a silent prayer, and though my limbs would scarcely obey I challenged the monster out there, whatever it might be, to reclaim its shroud.

'My face locked in a twisted grimace, I thrust my arm through the aperture and I showed the demon that for which it sought, and it looked up and beheld me high in the stronghold, my own shape but a silhouette cast in the glow of the torches. Emitting a furious snarl, the monster responded to my contest. That snarl was a ghastly ire that seemed to physically pulse forth from its grey and agitated form. It roared a throbbing palpitation, fierce and shrill, like a staccato musical note played on fleshless bones in hell, harsh and cacophonous, awful and guttural, a scraping howl that thrummed through the air making visible waves as it blasted aside the fog. The shrouded beast convulsed obscenely, as if in a perverted ecstasy, and as it quivered and raised its covered visage, it moved toward the tower, gliding below my loophole and my silhouette framed in the Gothic arch, and I thought I glimpsed under its canopy of gauze a slash of ruby red, like a distant fire burning in a subterranean antechamber, and the stark white of razor sharp fangs dripping with blood. That awful maw was the abyss into Hell, a serrated cavern that led only into a fireless darkness and a dreadful life beyond death. In one ghastly moment, I suffered every bodily weakness, for my limbs sagged and my head reeled and as I trembled where I stood I could feel the excrement turning to ice in my bowels, even as I passed through all the phases of human terror.

'In dread I turned my head, and peered over the gallery. The shroud squirmed and twisted wetly about in my hand. How it had begun to burn, but not with a fire fuelled by heat, but through an agency of ice, cold, cold, searing ice. The fabric folded in upon itself, looping about my wrist and frosting my skin. Then, possessed of an unnatural life of its own, it struck upward like a snake to wind about and constrict my throat. With a cry of horror, I flung the squirming cerecloth from my body and it fell to the floor at the lip of the stairs. There it curled about and twitched as does a worm. Below I heard the door crash open violently and from the corner of my eye I saw the monster enter the chapel of the Karnsteins. Its frame was spectral, floating, and it took to the tower ascent under the steely gaze of its own monstrous ancestors. Around the stairs it climbed, deliberately, slowly, drawing out my agony with a low, guttural growling that reverberated in the well of the edifice. The sound turned my nerves to ice. It was a monstrous sound, the awful growl of a tyger, one of those large and ferocious cats from the exotic Indian continent, but a snarl aurally rearranged and mutated, a thousand times more terrifying. Stepping backwards I cast a furtive glance behind me, and my shadow proclaimed my terrible and restricted space by spilling up the wall at my back.

'There was nowhere to run. As I moved I drew my sword from its sheath, the blade sung blue-silver in the pale moonbeams, and as if the shroud knew somehow of my intent I heard the rasping of the cloth and beheld the magical knots I had tied beginning to unravel. I knew no peasant's enchantment could bind the thing now, and that I should have long ago forsworn such magic as evil. I knew that the beast must reclaim its shroud if it were to rest this night in its black and unnatural bower, and that it would not rest until it had achieved my death. How I could feel my heart thudding with anticipation as my fingers turned white around the handle of my blade. The ancient tracts proclaim that a vampire can be destroyed only by a stake through the heart or by decapitation, and thus primed, I waited the moment, sword in hand. The low animal growling suddenly ceased and a dread silence fell over the tower. The shadows in the stairway loomed and flickered, and by the light of the torches the monster halted upon the final step and began to gather substance and solidity. Looking on mesmerised, I saw the shroud slither over the dark space that divided myself and the demon. Even as I stared in terror I beheld what might have been an arm reach down. Awed and horribly fascinated I gazed in wonder as the fabric seemed to leap up from the stone into the non-flesh grasp of a non-flesh hand and then to reclaim its part of the fiend's veiled mantle. A peculiar scent abruptly filled the air. It was an intoxicating odour, of perfume, of a soft and lilting fragrant air meant to cloud my senses. Such a sweet and glorious nidor, but so strange and heady that it might have been the breath of the angels had I not perceived that it wafted from the throat of the grave. It staggered my senses like a philtre induces a stupor, and thus paralysed and held in a dreadful suspense, I vain could move a limb. Even as I looked on in terror and fascination, the beast revealed its true form. The veil that covered its entire body peeled away, slipping to the stone pavements, shed in a glittering rain of silver grey and starlight. Scintilla sparked and flared as the garment fell to the floor, little ribbons of wispy smoke curled up from its filmy gauze mass. The shroud coiled itself tightly together at the creature's bare feet and my gaze travelled up its figure, along the curve and form of something ethereal, niveous and golden, and the vampire looked upon me.

'Here my words must falter because it is a foul stain upon my soul that I considered the face of evil and that it was so beautiful. Before me stood a woman of exquisite loveliness and instead of the darkness and the shadows, instead of the devil's fleshly mouldings I saw only skin the colour of cream and the aureate cascade of her hair. Under the hazy, opaque translucence of her gown I saw the shape of her calves, of her thighs and her golden sex, of her hips and her flat belly, of her full and succulent breasts, nipples like berries. How I gasped, it was all that I could do for no words could I articulate, no words could ever suffice. Before me stood the Siren, and slowly, gracefully she held out her arms. I could see the blue traces of veins beneath that skin, so delicate and so ivory, veins that now flowed with the blood of the kill, and she stepped forth, stepped up to my frozen body and she smiled. Her eyes were like jewels. I recall they were the colour of amethyst and were lit by a darker flame, a fire of chrome that glinted off the vermillion of her lips. Closer she came, filling the airs with the scent of hyacinth and heliotrope and she raised an arm, and gently, softly, tenderly she touched my cheek. I tell all of you now, to my endless shame, that as she touched me a rush of heat shot through my frozen flesh. It was a flash of pleasure and of wanting, and as her hand stroked downward and flit over my torso I felt a quickening, a compulsion to hold her and to have her. I saw, or at least some other and detached part of me saw her lift her other arm and begin to push aside my cloak to reveal my neck.

'As the heavy fabric tugged at its silver clasp and chain the fingers of her other hand brushed against my sex, for it had become hard and insistent inside of my hose. All this I recall passed in a weakly human moment, in a second wherein a galaxy imploded inside my mind and the unthinkable was my lust for a vampire. In her victorious moment I glimpsed my fate, my doom sealed, my death a surety. The creature peeled away the collar of my cloak so that her strike would be swift and true, but as the heavy material fell away it revealed the cross I wore on a loop about my throat. By some miracle she did not see, but the cruciform brass glinted in the dancing firelight and as she pressed her voluptuous body into mine the rose-tipped bud of her left bosom touched upon the cross. The vampire gasped, her white skin seared and burned by the holy symbol, a branded welt imprinted into the flesh above her nipple. Being struck by a wave of shock and bursting with a violent and horrible wrath the vampire's eyes sprang wide and were eclipsed by purple flame as her mouth stretched open to reveal the dagger-like fangs. Deep into my shoulder went her fingers, hard into my flesh, and the pain was incredible. To this day I am weak and lack strength in my arms. The sweetly perfumed air abruptly became the foetid stink of the wormy grave. With a cry and a hiss all merged into one ghastly sound, and befouling the cross I wore, spraying it with a jet of poisoned spittle that flew from her red lips and tongue, she lunged at my neck. I glimpsed in that horrible visage the twisted metamorphosis from human skin to that of feral beast, the beautiful face altering in a lightning flash into something half the colour of human flesh and half veined membrane and pelt. Upon that instant I must thank the Lord Almighty that he awoke me from that realm of senseless darkness. As I regained my senses I grasped her flowing golden locks with clawing fingers and I pulled her by the hair from my throat. Volts of pain burned my arm where she clutched, and the female vampire thrashed and fought me, venomous as a snake, attacking and snapping her vicious crimson mouth and serrated teeth, possessed of a strength that almost outdid my own. As she struggled the beast began to unfold, to peel back her coil and to become her true self, the preternatural monster spewed forth from the land of the dead. Slicing the air in a singing, silver sweep my sword flashed upward and in one powerful and blood-spattered stroke I cut off her head.

'After I had destroyed the monster in the tower I returned to the graveyard, for there was no time to waste. Nonetheless there was no notion of the heroic in the terrible things I had yet to do. In the burial ground there were many crypts, many black bowers protected by the walls of this ancient citadel wherein slept the evil Karnsteins, and my quest was to find them all and end their terrible nocturnal visitations upon humankind. The moon was pale and I placed my lamp upon the ground and removed my cloak and coat, and with spade and axe I ploughed the earth until it gave forth a box of rotten wormwood, and therein lay exposed the second Karnstein to be destroyed. I reached forth and pulled back the monster's death shroud and as the transparent fabric slid away it revealed the face of an exquisitely lovely woman. I could plainly see the cherry red tips of her breasts and the whiteness of her skin, but lo, upon her chin was a stream of gore, and the gore poured from the cavity of her open mouth. That mouth was studded with a row of sharp barbed teeth. Her eyes were closed. The blood oozed and ran into the thing's grave clothes; and from the coffin a rank and thick miasma rose in the swirling mists to assail my nostrils. Involuntarily I confess that I had gagged, heaving forth the contents of my stomach amid a flow of stinging bile. The stink and the convulsions were terrible and upon the point where I could vomit no more I wiped the putrescence from my mouth and reached out for a stake. When the final convulsion had shuddered away and the acid sting was spit from my lips, I gripped with shaking hand a length of mountain ash that I had sharpened and had tempered in the fire.

'This lethal spike I positioned above the creature's undead heart, the hardened point indented into cerement and blood-stained skin, and with a last prayer offered up to God I drove the stake down with force. The stillness of the night cracked open, and the ghastly anthropophagi opened its mouth and screamed. The stake ruptured skin and snapped ribs as it tore through the befouled and rancid heart and a garnet fountain shot up from its rent breast in a repellent jet of gore. This female of the Karnsteins opened her eyes and they glowed with furious rage and accused and damned me as she howled the most piercing and dreadful shriek I had ever heard. That great gout of blood jetting forth splashed up the sleeves of my arms, turning the lace on my cuffs from white to cochineal, and the blood spattered over my face. I was again sick from the vile, burning Sulphur that splashed over my lips and I felt the cold body beneath me squirm and thrash and kick within the rigid confines of the box. I held the stake firm and soon the vampire groaned and thrashed no more and I released the shaft and collapsed against the wall of the grave. For a short while my heart raced and my breath was laboured and I trembled all over. Yet I knew that I had to keep moving, for the night would soon be ended and I would not have accomplished the terrible work that I had set out to do. In this I told myself I was guided by the hand of God, and that I must put aside all of my fatigues and horrors lest my venture fail and the Karnsteins continue to rape the earth.

'By the pale flickering light of my lamp I went on to the next tomb, a high granite sepulchre, and with axe and pry bar I hammered and smashed and then with the pain still throbbing in my shoulder I pushed the broken stone back and the broke the seal. The stone cracked into heavy chunks, and with some force I managed to thrust them aside and open the tomb to the stars. Therein was the coffin. The lid splintered apart as I tore into its rotting timbers, and coiled in its length like a thick grey serpent was revealed another winding sheet. The cerement protruded from the thing's mouth, half-devoured, and when I pulled the sheet away it came forth wetly and clotted with blood. Once exposed, the moonlight shone upon the face of a beautiful, raven-haired man. The light washed over that regal visage like mercury, and it showed high cheeks and a chiselled, Hellenistic nose, and I could even see the colour of his eyes glowing through the translucent skin of his eyelids. Those eyes were the deepest hue of blue that one has ever beheld, and from both corners of his fanged mouth ran streams of copious gore. The sight was awful and yet beautiful too, and to perform the final rite of execution I straddled the beast, kneeling and placing my knees alongside the sleeping revenant. There issued forth a dreadful stench as my knees sank into a black tide of blood, for the blood simmered in the bottom of the box up to the depth of seven inches, and it reeked with such a disagreeable redolence that I was again almost sick again unto vomiting. Trembling above that body, with both hands gripping the length of my sharpened stake, I readied myself to strike down. The thing opened its eyes and its hands shot up, its fingers like hooks, and it curled one clasp about my wrist and the other about the back of my neck. Hissing and spitting it pulled me down and drew me in close, so close and with such fulmination that I scarce could catch my own breath. In a cold vice, it held me fast and I overbalanced and fell heavily upon its glacial, spongy and repulsive flesh.

'These undead creatures are strong, perhaps ten times stranger than any mortal man, and with little effort the demon clenched and held me down. In that moment, the handsome face melted away and transformed into something that was hideously beyond a nightmare. It became a horrible amalgamation of Desmodus and Panthera, and I cried out and I thrashed but it did me no good. In my terror, I felt myself becoming tangled in its shroud, netted like a fish, enmeshed and smothered, though I still held fast to my stave. For one ghastly second, I thought the stick might snap in twain, for it glanced sharply against the coffin wall, its tip twisting in the burial garb, its length jarring in my grasp. The vampire smiled lasciviously and raised its hips against my torso and began to make obscene thrusts. The hideous and carnal movement made agitations in the sea of blood in which it lay, and sickened my mouth opened wide in revulsion. With God's mercy, I did not let go of the stake, and the point of that weapon I managed to twist around till it hovered a mere centimetre from the creature's left eye. It did not even blink. With all my might I heaved against its bind, but I could not bring the stake closer, and even as I struggled I felt the vampire's legs and thighs enwrap my own and then the horrible and inexorable traction as it pulled me even closer into the most loathsome embrace that I have ever endured. Its tongue flashed out from its fanged mouth, sticky and long, and its breath was the expelled wind of a bloated beast whose corpse has been punctured. With a leer and a sinuous movement, the monstrous face evaded the point of the stake and it clamped its rotten mouth upon my lips and began to suck. That awful tongue entered in between my lips and worse, releasing the grip of my wrist its clawed hand swiftly ripped the buttons from my breeches and the scrabbling fingers were inside my clothing, encircling my sex. I tried to scream, and the thing slid up and down against me, and for a second time that night my sex went stiff.

'Nothing can compare to the repulsion of that moment. Fight as I might to release my hold, it worked upon me, and I could neither escape nor let go of the sharpened stake. With shameful ignominy, I remember my sex engorging, encased in its cold stroke, and my gasp was of both pleasure and of pain as it rapidly drew back my foreskin and stroked violently as I thrashed about. The creature held me close, its tongue lashing stickily over my face, and immobilised as I was, it worked rapidly upon my member, the adrenalines firing through my veins with galvanic intensity. As it performed this vile act its lubricious tongue sealed my mouth with its horrible kiss. How I gagged and groaned and twisted but could not strike out, and I heard it give a guttural laugh as it grasped at my body, tighter and tighter. It worked me like a piston works an engine, its tongue going deeper into my throat, its fingers faster and faster upon my flesh. I shudder that amid this mire of filth my mind conjured the image of my sister Isabella; and upon her sweet face the night burst with a thousand dying stars. My screams of ecstasy and agony and humiliation will echo that night eternal and their echo will pursue me all the way to the next world. I hope my Lord can forgive! How shall I confess this corruption before God, but that I was both loathed and thrilled at this degradation? Yet too, I do not know how, but somewhere in the carnality of the act I managed to force the salivating thing from my mouth, to twist away and to gasp for breath. It gave another vile and guttural inhuman laugh, and it growled to me a perverse promise that it was going to violate me, thrust into my body and implant its wicked seed of filth into my Christian flesh. Upon that vow, I managed to shift slightly, and the creature spat a clot of nauseous phlegm into my face and then it attacked my throat. In that moment, I could move my freed hand, but only by a few centimetres, but that was enough, and as I felt my sex upon the edge of climax, the cross I wore tumbled from the folds of my blood-stained shirt. The pale moon glinted upon the holy symbol and threw a trail of yellow sparks. With one final squeeze, the vampire let go of my shaft, disgracefully too late as I felt the warm discharge of my own fluids, spurting into the agitated tide of gore in the coffin. Upon the moment of my horrible climax, the creature's demon features buckled up and twisted with disgusting triumph. The light from the cross seared its vision and it howled, and that split second was enough for me to thrust down with the sliver of timber, and it entered the demons eye and burst from the back of its skull, pinning it down. Quickly I snatched up another stake and as the thing writhed and shrieked I slammed down my sharpened spike with all my might and tore its heart to strips, killing it in the filthy flesh-eating box in which it lay.'

An appalling silence hung over the three gentlemen, a worse than sombre pall that was punctuated only by the note of low thunder of the brewing storm gathering in the vast and high and purple sky dome.

'After I had crawled from that disgusting, bloody tomb, I worked through the night,' Baron Hartog continued eventually, and in recalling his shame he set his jaw into a hard rictus. 'Until, in my exhaustion, I could dig no more.'

The General, Ebhardt and Mr. Morton had remained mute throughout the Baron's abominable tale, equally as revolted and contemplating their own disgraces as they passed beneath the accusatory gazes of the Karnstein ancestors. Baron Hartog paused with a grimace. Hartog closed his eyes and shook his head in self-deprecation.

'After the horrors of the night,' he confessed, 'I could not spend another moment in this place.'

With trembling lips, he continued to finish his tale.

'By the end of that foul night the graveyard of the Karnsteins had burst forth its bloated corpses and they now lay pinned to the diseased earth in which they were buried. Bespattered from head to foot in filth and liquescence, I, Baron Hartog had knelt in prayer and then weakly risen on quaking limbs and staggered through the grim primordial forest to the safety of the living terrene huddled far below. At the inn, I told the young Kurt of how I had fled back down the mountain to the village, and he in turn related to me of how the village lad had been killed and the young tavern wench defiled. With his care, he helped me to return to the world of the sane. I swore I had killed them all, that I had delivered the village from the evil of the undead family of Karnstein, but the truth is I did not. One remained... '

Hartog paused grimly and held up his lantern. The yellow light washed over a web-festooned portrait hanging from a jewelled chain. 'There was one grave I did not find,' he told the men, speaking with serious gravity, 'that of a young girl. Here is her sweet and gentle face…'

The men looked up. They saw the dusty painting come alive in the shifting beams of the lamp. It was of a beautiful woman who would scarce have gone beyond her twentieth year, as gloriously exquisite as any goddess, gorgeous beyond all compare. Its tints and hues still glowed in the canvas and the visage was as alive and fresh as was the girl on the day that she had posed for it over three hundred years ago.

'Mircalla,' said the Baron, and he intoned the appellation as though it were a curse, 'the Countess of the Karnsteins who died three centuries past, who lives on now, undead... a vampire.'

The name rang like a strident bell in the stale atmospheres. The face that shaped that portrait had been the face of the same vile creature that had perverted and destroyed his sister Isabella. Into his father's house the demon had come, invited as a guest to live among them and to be loved, and to feed and to kill. That loveliness and that beauty had remained in Hartog's tortured memory for the last forty years. It was the face of the cockatrice, the liar and the illusionist, the succuba that had embrangled their lives with deception and masquerade.

'Marcilla!' declared the General, recognising his lovely but perfidious house guest, the demon that had seduced and killed his niece. That was the face celestial, the sylph that had met him on the stairs and considered his soul. On that eve Marcilla had silently challenged him, even as his ward was descending unto death in her fevered bower, enamoured of unnatural desire, calling pitiably for the strange love of this beautiful stranger. Marcilla, cold and confident, proud and arrogant, the daughter of a feudal lord long dead, had discarded him and his perceived authority, and left the General Spielsdorf quaking in her wake. That he had commanded an army had meant little to Marcilla, for she understood all too well that the General's own lusts were the penalty he must pay, and his brother's offspring the life forfeit.

'That girl is a guest in my house!' cried Roger Morton. 'Her name is Carmilla, and my daughter is dying!'

Morton's expostulation might have been comical had it not arisen out of the shameful and loathsome odium of his own hypocrisy. He turned swiftly to depart, to turn his face from these other men, to fly this castle ruin in case they perceived his own interior horrors and judge. Morton intended to ride to his home, for the beast was there, in his house, preying upon his child, draining her life's blood and her vitality. Perhaps belated valour was the only possible way to redeem his soul, and yet there was a terrible and perverse thrill attached to that valour. In mid step General Spielsdorf gripped Morton's arm and stayed the Englishman's flight.

'Morton, wait!' he exclaimed, 'Ebhardt knows every inch of these forests. He will get to your house in half the time.'

Young Ebhardt stepped up and his eyes locked eyes with the General. For now, the past was debris that had fallen into the valley, tumbled below the bridge and flowed out into the great ocean of regret. There was no time for remorse now, too many foolish things had been said and done and none of those things had been heroic, only selfish. Those deeds needed to be as dust now for none of that past was important any more, but Emma Morton's innocent life was important, and it was Ebhardt who must fly to her rescue.

'For God's sake,' Morton begged, and in his feeble pleading he saw a dark finger pointing at his core and he almost fell to his knees and sobbed. 'Save her!'

A gust of wind blew an abrupt tempest through the castle entrance and with it came the laughter, a vile, mocking, derisive laughter that challenged this posse to claim an impossible victory from the clasp of their pathetic vainglory.

Renton ascended the stairs with a vacant countenance, his shadow passing over the glass panels of the etchings hanging upon the wall. He drifted past Coliseum and Pyramid with a vision blind for his thoughts were dulled and his action provoked by instinct. There was something he must do and it was imperative, nothing would deflect him from his path. When he reached the gallery, he stared down the length of the corridor and his face was an unflinching mask, his eyes oddly burnished and expressionless. At Emma's door, he stopped and thrust out a hand, pushing the door open, but he did not enter the room. A wave of noxious fumes billowed from the chamber and the odour of garlic assailed his nostrils. He looked upon Emma Morton in her bed, her face pale and almost the colour of the sheet, her hair a wave a fine brown silk. The girl was writhing ever so slightly, her lips trembling and she was toying with the cross that encircled her throat, her errant fingers stroking the cool gold chain, and the tourmaline glinted with blue stars. She was moaning lowly in her sleep. Gretchin was sitting in a chair by the bedside and she too had fallen asleep.

'That cross,' Renton said aloud, startling the maid awake, 'it's marking her neck.'

Gretchin's eyes snapped open immediately and she looked toward the man who had suddenly appeared in the doorway. She quickly tidied her appearance, smoothing her pinafore and pushing an errant lock of her hair back under her cap. The maid looked from the man in the door frame to the girl in the bed.

'Put it back in the case.' Renton flicked his eyes toward the velvet lined box on the dresser.

'It's not marking her neck, sir,' Gretchin lamely protested and Renton's eyes blazed and he vehemently spat his next command.

'Do as I say, girl!' Gretchin felt her insides shrink and her nerve collapse. In terror, she leapt out of her chair and immediately proceeded to remove the cross.

'Take these away!' the butler voiced contemptuously, pointing to the garlic flowers, a ripple of disgust twisting up his features.

'Sir,' Gretchin remonstrated with a quaking voice, for she had already been enmeshed in the same struggle over the pungent herbs before Mademoiselle Perrodon had taken to and locked herself up in her own bedroom. These counter commands from Mr. Renton were confusing and Gretchin did not wish to be the one ultimately responsible for anything awful befalling her mistress. 'You said yourself,' Gretchin added cautiously, 'that I was not to...'

'Do as I say!' Renton turned in his fury and strode off and shaking in her fear, Gretchin began to collect the vases of garlic flowers.

In the grounds of Karnstein Castle the party of avenging men searched the crypts. They tossed aside vine and bracken, scraped moss from time worn inscription and hauled aside broken branches. As they searched the surroundings the clouds above their heads roiled and became denser, obscuring the pale moon, the thunder seeming to draw closer upon the mountain top. A thick mist began to coil about sepulchre and vault. Mr. Morton had become agitated. In fear for his daughter's life, being in this place, this mouldering necropolis had begun to put a spark to the fire of that gnawing and rapacious hunger in his nerves. There was death all about him, and this new thing called 'undeath', and the growing excitement had begun to throb in his veins. The proximity of the other men had suddenly become unbearably cloying and so, unnoticed he momentarily separated from the General and Baron Hartog and thrust aside the thick foliage of a thorny bush. Beyond this stood the blackened trunk of a lightning blasted tree and here he stopped and put out his hand to steady his stance. He had broken out in a fevered sweat, and gasping and groaning Morton told himself that he must not let the other men see his distemper; he had to master the fervent urge of his desires, his amorous cravings for flesh upon the brink of death. The swell of his member was insistent, and he tried to focus on the search for the tomb of the Countess Mircalla, but the whole thought of the danger and the dark only served to excite him further. He heard the General call out, but found it difficult to respond.

'Light, over here,' beckoned the General, ripping away a festoon of strangling vines. Baron Hartog responded with his flickering lamp. The light shone upon a chipped inscription but it was not that of the Countess.

'We must find that grave,' said Hartog, grim in his urgency, 'and quickly.'

A silver sheet of lightning illumed their gaunt faces and the sky changed from mulberry to black in the space of a heartbeat. Morton took a deep breath and struggled back through the bushes, little fanged barbs hooked into the fabric of his cloak. Wrenching his clothing free he staggered breathless to join the other men, and as he reeled he came perchance upon a granite crypt, and carved into the stone was the inscription that proclaimed the resting place of the Countess Mircalla Karnstein who had died in 1546. In that instant, his focus altered and his breath came back, and he felt exultant, not weak and in his moment of triumph, for now he might expunge the evil that was woman from his soul. He called out to the General.

'Here, it's over here!'

Baron Hartog approached with his lamp, dividing the sea of crawling mist as he came up to Morton. All three men looked upon the name riven in the stone, and all three men knew then where the earth had received a beautiful girl, some three hundred years before. 'No shroud?' the Baron asked, but no cerecloth was evident about the perimeter of the tomb. He signalled the General's footmen. 'Fetch the box,' he told them, and they went to work to crack open the mould covered sepulchre.

The clock was approaching the hour of midnight and the house shivered with a restless quietude as Gretchin took up the last of the garlic flowers and removed them from Emma's room. She closed the door softly and headed downstairs to the kitchen. As the maid disappeared a long shadow stained the carpet in her wake, a shadow that spilled up the stairs and undulated along the corridor. Within its billowing cloud a chaos of sparks and molten silver whirled; it splashed over the walls, twined between the banister rails and slithered over the etchings hanging in the stairwell, the glass cracked in each gilded frame as it passed. The darkness began to weave along the gallery, flowing upward, a cascade of liquid shades deeper than an oubliette; a phantom conjured from a web of blackness. From this writhing, insectile maelstrom of shadows a form seemed to take shape, and the air grew pungent with the sickly-sweet perfume of living death. It ceased in Carmilla's door frame and the panel slid silently ajar. It began a song and a summons and soon Renton, breathless in his anticipation, answered the call. He felt his chest rise and fall rapidly and he shivered but it was not with fear, but with longing, and he came up to the door and stopped. He had watched in the hallway until Gretchin had taken away the flowers, silently waiting, and the shadow had poured over his flesh and darkened his eyes. Carmilla was standing and looking at him, her red lips glistening. She had waited long enough and time was moving swiftly; an eternity of longing had governed her existence and she could wait no longer. Her love beckoned and she had to obey. There was a chill in the air, something other than cold, like the last breath leaking from the purple mouth of a corpse, but Renton did not notice because his skin was afire. He had come to Carmilla, heard the rhapsody of her song and it filled him with longing. The song she sang was a conjuration that foretold the joys of the divine.

Carmilla stepped back to let Renton enter and his senses were intoxicated, filled with the scent of dying roses in the frozen air. It was the smell of a bloom gone rotten and wormy, but somehow the scent was glorious and it made him drunk with eagerness. Carmilla was a pillar of white fire, blazing in the splintered, roiling shadows within her room. The butler gloated upon her with a thirsty gaze and a frisson twisted a serpentine path up his spine; his palms went damp and his manhood hardened. As he entered the room the door closed of its own volition. Carmilla reached up a hand and undid the ribbon at the bosom of her nightgown. The gossamer peeled away, opening as does the wings of a new butterfly emerging from a silk cocoon, falling aside to expose her breasts. A rush of heat flamed through Renton's body. Every nerve and sinew sparked, lit by a cosmic taper, an agony that invaded his flesh, an agony of lust and sweet corruption. In his head Renton still heard the song, the sweet lilt of Carmilla's voice and it called his name, sounding the syllables as if they were sung from the enchanted throat of malediction. Yet it was such a beautiful song and it turned his flesh to water, an enchantment that made him reel and almost swoon upon the floor. The girl gave a twisted leer, but he did not see this for all his vision beheld only her nightclothes as they slid even further down so that the curves of her body were free. His eyes gloated upon her milky skin and in response she changed the beautiful pitch of her midnight song. It went up a note, higher, higher. Obediently Renton came to her, ignorant that none among the living had ever heard the voice of Seraphim sung so sweet and survived.

She backed step by step towards the bed, leaving the ethereal trail of her nightdress where it fell, and spread her nakedness across a silken width of illusion and false promises. Another shock of desire went through Renton, a need to feel Carmilla's lips sealed to his lips, the darkness and his own Vulcan coil become one thunderous melding; a compact he would gladly make with the Devil. Carmilla became rigid and then went limp, a little moan escaped from her lips and she gasped and sighed and writhed about in the bed. The night sang its chorus with a choir of dark angels. Closer Renton drew, his eyes beaming like torches, his lips wanting her lips to burn the violent inferno of his mouth. He fell on the bed beside the girl and as he touched her skin he felt little slices of ecstasy and forever flood over his body. It was as if lava had been poured directly into his veins from the hot and gaping caldera of Vesuvius. Every dream Renton had ever dreamed, every woman he had ever wanted, they were as nothing now. Those desires must be cast aside, for now the way was paved to awakening unto a dream that was beyond pleasure. The desire filled Renton's reeling mind with splendid perversity, consumed him, enveloped him, and it spilled through the beautiful Siren's lips and poured molten fire into his soul. The vampire smiled as it twisted about upon the silken sheets. She ran a floating stroke over her sculptured beauty, her rose-tipped breasts, over her ivory thighs. Her white fingers played with the long auburn tresses of her hair. She was lovely, a vision more splendid than any goddess and her lips were ripe and glistening, red as blood. Her breath was hot and with the fingers of her free hand she ran her touch over her belly and began to stroke the golden forestry crowning her sex. In rapture Carmilla threw back her head and parted her legs and her scent was potent, cloying, arising from the fleshy petals of a newly blossomed orchid.

On fire at her side, Renton was almost pleading to take her. He knew her no longer as the beautiful house guest they had rescued from a broken carriage, shaken and afraid, but now as the liberator of his desires. Nonetheless, Renton knew not that this lovely creature was an intimate of Death, a terrifying lover who had died yet lived. In that desire, the darkness began to envelop them as they lay upon the bower of the black dream. Ebon stars were threaded into her hair; her mouth was a crimson arch that spoke of depravity and succulent evils that were joys and carnal pleasures beyond anything Renton could ever experience. He was hypnotised, and her eyes, they were portals through which eons had passed in flame, alight with the remnants of dead suns and broken stars, they saw beyond the frail garment of the flesh. She extended white, white hands, the hands of a living corpse, for no blood flowed through the veins, and those fingers were long and thin and they undid the buttons of Renton's shirt and tore the garment aside. Renton rolled onto his back and Carmilla opened his breeches, liberating his member and clasping it, and she began a slow and carnal stroke. Renton lay at the precipice of creation and he gasped and half rose to push her down onto her back, to mount her, but she held him tight and continued to seal his mouth with her kiss. A shudder raced through Renton's body. It was like pain, a sick but wonderful and breath-taking pain that heralded joys as her fingers gripped his sex. The bud of her nipple became a fruit that he wanted to eat, and her calculated caresses made his skin contract, and it was all an agony that he wanted to scream aloud of his pleasure. Carmilla's touch seemed to last for an eternity, massaging and kneading and melting his flesh, altering, remoulding the clay from which God had fashioned Adam. The girl's fingertips were the wings of a moth doing an exquisite dance over his skin, stroking and coaxing with living flame. At length, she straddled his body. This would be the moment, and Renton groaned, feeling the wetness and the warmth of her against his thigh. Her hand left off his member and brushed over his testes and lingered, holding him apart and exploring deeply. Hovering, corporeal, moving like a sinuous column of smoke her face inched down. Although she had not taken a human breath in over three hundred years, it was as if a desert wind seared where the wetness of a serpent's tongue slavered.

Renton wanted to fill her body now, and he could no longer stand the pleasure and the agony that was burning his flesh. Her tongue was a whorl of white-hot excitement and the fervour of lust knotted up his desires. His pleasure must reach beyond the core of his soul, for he needed to feel Carmilla from the inside, and she was so gloriously beautiful. Renton gasped as Carmilla's mouth left his sex and he closed his eyes and he fought off the spasm of lust. The fight left him all but senseless. The vampire dragged her fevered kiss up over his belly and tasted the hardness of his nipples; and she covered his nakedness with the flow of thick tresses. Renton's face became entangled in the heavy weave of her hair and his breath became stifled. Carmilla drew back her lips but Renton did not see the terrible row of fangs, and the vulpine kiss was like fire, sinking into Renton's neck so deep that he clawed and groaned and tears spilled from his eyes. Ruby blood jetted upon the pillow. The darkness erupted in a blaze more intense than a collapsing star, incendiary, and Renton felt a delicious suffering such as he had never felt before. The vampire shook and quivered in its disgusting ecstasy, drinking from the fountain of Renton's life force. As the fresh blood poured into the chalice of Carmilla's mouth, it seeded something that was dreadful and yet wonderful. It gave her the strength and the vitality to challenge the coming storm, and she covered Renton's twitching flesh as if she were ice over the surface of a lake in winter. Even as he realised his mistake, that Mademoiselle Perrodon was not the predator but rather the victim, Renton ejaculated his seed. He could not stop the convulsion, not now, not while this exquisite stupor fuelled the sensual furnace of his being. He wanted to cry out his agony but he could not, and he felt his soul being sucked into the tenebrous realm of darkness, and in that darkness he drowned in an ocean of blasphemous lust, the sounds of Carmilla's feeding like the rapturous tolling of bells. How the creature was ravenous and how it glutted, and its poison flowed through Renton, through the vessel of his body and it throbbed with a rush of toxins that benumbed every muscle and rapidly it erased all vestiges of his pathetic life.

Chapter 14

Ordeal And Execution

In which Ebhardt rescues Emma, and how The General, Baron Hartog and Mr. Morton search for the tomb of the Countess Mircalla.

Into Emma's room Carmilla glided. The brass and porcelain handle clicking softly as the door closed. She was dressed in white, drifting as the morning fog drifts upon the surface of a tranquil lake. As she crossed the room towards the bed the shadows parted, and she reached out and gathered up Emma's pretty shawl. Emma was asleep as Carmilla came up and stooped beside her, but the maiden awoke as if upon a silent summons. The beautiful stranger's face bloomed in her vision like an overblown flower. Blinking, Emma opened her eyes and turned her head. Emma thought for one moment that the figure in the room with her was a phantom, a ghost, a white thing shimmering in her blurry vision. Her mother... Emma tried to focus her eyes. Those eyes were now set deep within her chalk-white face and they were darkly ringed with kohl. There was little animation in her features and they belied the strain of approaching doom. The girl moaned and attempted to speak, but the words clogged up in her throat and she could only whimper pathetically. Realising sadly that it was not her mother who stood at her bedside, Emma murmured in repine.

'Carmilla?' Emma whispered, and yet she was not certain that the girl she saw beside her bed was real or just another dream. Carmilla came so often in the dream and the dream always ended in pain. Part of Emma did not want Carmilla to be there because of that pain, and another part of her desperately despised it when Carmilla held her tight. The emotions caused Emma an agonising conflict.

'Emma,' Carmilla responded as she leaned over her love. 'You can get up now.'

Emma raised her head slightly but she was so fragile and the movement caused agonising pain. 'I think I am too weak.' Her head fell listlessly back upon the lacy pillow.

'No, I will give you strength,' Carmilla encouraged. 'Come.'

The girl brushed against Emma and pressed close. Carmilla's skin was so smooth and cool, and her hand gently stroked Emma's cheek. As Carmilla came forward Emma glimpsed the pink buds of the girl's nipples showing through the diaphanous fabric of her gown. Her breast was so near that Emma believed in her delirium that she could see the tremble in the skin where Carmilla's heart beat just under the surface. Over Carmilla's shoulders her hair fell in a heavy auburn wave. That hair was thick and it almost smothered, and Emma whimpered because it reminded her of the spectral cat.

'Where?' Emma asked, for she did not feel that she could rise from the bed let alone walk into the night. Fear was clutching at her soul. How she adored Carmilla's friendship but she did not love as Carmilla loved her. Emma knew, and it was a terrible thought, that she was without the strength now to go anywhere except to where her dear friend Laura had gone, to the grave. With the thought came the tears and with the tears the world began spinning and her head started reeling.

'I am taking you with me,' Carmilla told her, but her voice had taken on a tragic tone. This tremble in Carmilla's voice was vaguely disconcerting for it undermined her aloof strength, and it issued from deep within her undead coil. There was no time to be wasted because those avenging men would come for her soon and they would turn her world into ashes. The beautiful stranger took hold of her companion's arm and assisted her into a sitting position, pulling the silken shawl about the girl's shoulders.

'My father?' Emma groaned in her stupor. As if he could help!

'Come,' Carmilla responded, ignoring the question and almost pulling Emma from the bed. 'There is no need for father's now, neither yours nor mine. Hurry!'

The carpet burned under Emma's bare feet as she stood and took a few shaky steps. Pain shot through her legs and hips and her flesh seemed to map every minute fracture that spiralled across the surface of every weary bone. Surely, she must collapse, and tears began to well up in her eyes. Of its own accord, the door opened and Carmilla gently guided Emma through.

Gretchin had thrown the garlic flowers away. She had run down the garden path in the dark and tossed them into the midden pit. From somewhere beyond the forest she heard a howl and a snarl and her skin turned to gooseflesh. A wave of fright swept through her body and jangled nerves got the better of Gretchin. Rumbling over the distant mountains was the sound of thunder and the maid thought that she saw, illumined in the brief sheet lightning, a dark, cuculate figure under the great oak beyond the garden. The sight made her gasp in shock, but when the lightning flashed again the shape had gone and Gretchin quickened her step back to the kitchen. Once inside she bolted the door and took a deep breath and told herself to calm down. There were things to be done before Renton came down and ordered her into service and she did not want to go through any further harassment at this late hour. He would surely berate her for being stupid, telling her that she was a child who was seeing things in the dark. No doubt, after some disparaging remark he would no doubt try to paw at her flesh. The serving girl shook her head at the horrible thought and rubbed at her arms. She felt cold and frightened as she looked around the kitchen. She had placed the vases she must empty on the sideboard near a covered tray that cook had prepared before retiring. The tufted sprigs of greens poked out from under the patterned cloth. A killed fowl hung plucked and upside down from a peg, dripping a soft patter of gore into the sluice. The sight of the dead bird made Gretchin squirm in repulsion, but she must now empty the water from the vases and wash them and put them away before she could go to her cot. She took a jug of water and flushed away the blood and then she picked up one of the vases. The smell of garlic still clung to the jar and she set it down in the sluice to scrub and rinse.

Gretchin sighed with the realisation that she might have to sit up all through the night again with Miss Emma, but Mr. Renton had been so contradictory in his orders that she was afraid to go back into her mistress's room. From beyond the kitchen door Gretchin heard a loud rapping sound. She almost jumped out of her skin. The sound came again. The girl stood still, her eyes staring wide like a frightened rabbit and she looked to the door. She had no idea who could be knocking on the kitchen door now of the night and she was afraid, but without knowing exactly why something compelled her to do so, she stepped forward to open the door. In a strange trance, she knocked over the second vase and the porcelain shattered on the kitchen flagstones as she reached out and pulled up the beam. She folded open the door and took a step back. A handsome woman stood on the doorstep. She was dressed in a long black cloak, the hood pulled up over her head, but her face gleamed from within that mantle, gleamed like white china, and she smiled.

'May I come in?' asked the Countess, and Gretchin nodded that the regal lady might, and the door closed as she entered and the night followed silently upon her heels. The stranger came up to the maid and reached up a slender arm. Gretchin didn't even flinch as the woman caressed and soothed away the serving girl's terrors.

'I must fetch Mr. Renton,' Gretchin muttered brokenly.

'You do not have to worry about Mr. Renton anymore,' sighed the Countess and Gretchin hardly even felt the lips upon her throat or the sharp teeth as they bit into her jugular. The world began to darken and there was pain, a blissful, enveloping pain as the blood was sucked from her young, virginal flesh, but Gretchin only shuddered in ecstasy and closed her eyes.

The men heaved against the tomb and with the harsh scraping noise of stone on stone the lid moved back. A shower of dust cascaded into its black confines. Baron Hartog lowered his lamp into the tumulus. A string of vines had burrowed into the stone and cracks zigzagged downward to where granite met earth. The tomb was empty.

'The coffin has gone!' uttered General Spielsdorf, his face locking into an anxious grimace.

'For God's sake, where?' asked Morton.

'Anywhere in this castle,' the Baron remarked in a staunch, matter-of-fact tone. 'Or in these grounds.' He looked to the General and the man shook his head as if he were in denial. It couldn't be so, to have come this far once again and not find the monster that had killed his sister, Isabella. Justice must be done. The General pulled his lamp back into the night, gently grasping the man's arm. A thread of mist curled up about the two men and danced before the light, occluding the candle flame. 'There is still time,' declared the Baron, 'for I doubt that she has yet returned.'

'She must be found!' Morton ejaculated, his eyes wide and fervid.

'She will not return,' continued Hartog, 'until she has glutted herself with the blood of at least one victim.' Hartog knew all too well that vampires were parasitic beings and that they must lie replete in their graves, wallowing in the blood and the filth upon which they had gorged. This creature will go to ground this night and might not be seen again for many years, but first it must feast.

'How can you be sure?' asked the General.

Baron Hartog's face became stern and vengeful and his words were brittle as he spoke them.

'Vampires are intelligent beings, General. They know when the forces of good are arraigned against them. She will want to rest a long time in her coffin. Perhaps for another forty years,' he said solemnly, and he searched the General's eyes for a promise that the man would not give up the fight. 'That is why this monster must be found and destroyed. She will be prepared for calamity and armed for her battle. We must watch for the signs and act when we have the chance.'

Morton moved away, casting his glance about but it was all so useless in the dark and the swirling mist. That coffin could be anywhere and there just wasn't time to look.

'If we can just find the shroud,' Morton called, thrusting aside a low hanging branch and continuing to search. The General and Hartog watched Morton as he moved thigh deep into the fog and then both moved off in the opposite direction. The General's coachmen followed, none were hopeful in their quest.

Carmilla helped Emma into the corridor and clutching the young woman to her side she held her tight, held her up. Her embrace was desperate and all-consuming, and Carmilla half-dragged Emma along the gallery.

'You're coming with me,' Carmilla said and there was desperate anguish in her voice. She was stroking Emma's hair and kissing her companion's pale face tenderly. 'To my home, it's not far from here, you can rest there.' The girl coaxed her invalid love to rest her head upon her shoulder. It was as if she already suspected that her fight to cling to and retain her love might be gone. There was despair and even sadness in her voice and there might have been glimpsed even the faintest trace of fear on her lovely face. She too understood that Emma would never be able to walk as far as Karnstein Castle, that the girl could not possibly survive the ordeal. Carmilla had waited too long, and then there was her father... How was she to hide Emma in her tomb without his knowing? The vampire shuddered in self-disgust, for she had drained too much of the girl's life away, but she did not wish to relinquish her love. Emma Morton groaned in her wasted agony, it seemed to exhaust the last of her failing strength. Simply staying on her feet and propped upright in Carmilla's arms consumed every breath and every tremulous heartbeat. It was painful to take a step, and each faltering tread made her dizzy. Although she tried she did not think that she could do as Carmilla wanted. She attempted to raise an arm to her companion's shoulder, but instead she only managed to clutch weakly at her hand. Emma's arm felt as if it were cast from lead. With a sorrowful and pathetic apology, she threw a look of misgiving into Carmilla's eyes. It would do no good, wherever it was that Carmilla must take her, it did not matter, for Emma Morton felt death shadowing her frail step. Soon she would collapse and soon her breath would leave her, but there was something yet that she had to know.

'Carmilla,' she gasped, struggling to breathe, 'tell me what is it that waits for us in the dark?' Carmilla only clasped her harder, tighter and her face went waxy and the lush pink hues of flesh drained from her lips.

'Please tell me. I must know. It watches you, it commands you. Please…'

The beautiful transient lifted her lily-like palm and stroked her amour's wan cheek. With a strange smile Carmilla leaned into Emma's body until the two were cheek to cheek.

'My father,' she whispered in her love's ear. 'Nonetheless, there is one last ruse, a boon of the dark, to bide us time.'

Upon that utterance, a great blast of wind descended upon the house and tore at its eaves and casements, stripping the sered ivy into flying pennants and snapping the boughs of the great oak in the park.

As he pulled himself up into his saddle Ebhardt beheld a vision in black billow up in the dark. The thing was composed of the substance of a shadow and it had waved at Ebhardt, laughing derisively and sitting high in the saddle upon its nightmare steed. A great wind had sprung up from the ether and with a triumphant shout the rider had hailed a challenge to the young man and spurred its beast into flight. Ebhardt gave chase. The two riders plunged down the mountainside, into the woods, flying at speed against the gale, the man in black thundering ahead. Crisp leaves scattered in the wake of galloping hoofs, low branches tore at Count Karnstein's cape and he howled with a wicked, mocking laughter that trailed in the wind. Argent sparks flashed from the hoofs of his terrible steed, and with its head set low, its eyes white and straining in the sockets, he goaded it into the forest. The demon's roar was picked up by the whorl of the tempest and it resounded through Carl's frame as if someone had punched him in the chest. The blast shook Ebhardt and almost knocked him from his saddle. Yet the young man dug his heels into his horse's flank as the mare veered and weaved under the trees and he held his seat. Twigs scratched against Ebhardt's cheek as he rode under the low branches and his face was fixed in a grimace of terrible despairing hope. He doubted that he could catch the demon, doubted even less that his dash to rescue Emma Morton would be in time enough to save her life, and he furrowed his brow and set his weight forward in the saddle.

Faster he rode, the forest ways swallowed in shadow, for the celestial disc of the moon had momentarily reappeared from a stitch in the clouds. By its wan light he glimpsed the shape on the horse ahead, its reins pulled taut, its teeth mad at the bit and the rider laughing, laughing. Ebhardt saw the brute he pursued stumble in the forest concourse, but the steed regained its stride, skimming over the earth as fleet as the wind. That brief stumble had given him a slight advantage. As thunder boomed like canon fire overhead Ebhardt chased the demon onward and drew nearer. How his heart raced in the chase, pushed on by a rush of adrenaline, his mare careering as he held himself low to her neck, her flying mane whipping his cheek. In the stroke of a heartbeat Ebhardt drew closer to the rider on the black horse, nearer and nearer, so close that they would soon be side by side, but then with a graceful swoop the rider stretched out long arms, spreading them like black wings. Ebhardt beheld the demon at close range, the wind stinging his eyes. The Count was as is Erebus, composed of the night, and resembled neither bird nor bat but was more a flowing torrent of mephitic insanity. His cloak was a flapping pennant, like plumage that trailed black threads of mist. The mist thickened and confused the way, roiled up about both riders so that soon all Ebhardt could see were the red and fiery sparks of the monster's eyes. The young man reached out to snatch at the billowing cape but the mist thickened and darkness swallowed darkness, and the path narrowed and horse and rider became obscured. Ebhardt's fingers grasped only empty vapours.

Yet Carl did not slacken his pace. He must not fail, not this time, for he understood his imperative that the woman he sought to save might even now be dead, or worse than dead, become one of the undead. He had to catch the demon he chased and destroy it or Emma Morton's soul was in deadly peril of being lost forever. The phantasm that was the Count gave a screeching whoop and his horse sped from Ebhardt's side. In a sudden rush of cruel fury, the vision on the dark horse vanished into the night and Ebhardt's mount abruptly burst from the woods and into the Morton's carriageway.

Carmilla led Emma to the stairs, and as they staggered one faltering step at a time in their descent a door opened upon their backs. Mademoiselle Perrodon filled the door frame, clad only in her nightdress, her raven locks tumbling in a dishevelled storm about her face, her breasts were heaving with every gasping breath. She glanced about in confusion, as if searching, seeking Carmilla, but in her disoriented countenance there was only the image of desperation and irremediable anxiety. She clutched at the door frame for support, almost unable to stand upright, weak from the kiss of the vampire but too much obsessed by desire to be discarded in her love.

'Carmilla!' she called, beseeching the beautiful young woman in the stairs. Carmilla glanced back but did not cease her descent. Mademoiselle Perrodon knew then the pain and the humiliation of rejection, knew that Carmilla did not care for her at all, but had used her. The girl had used love as a weapon to protect herself, protect her worship for Emma. The Governess shook her head in wild disbelief, panic-stricken, terrified that she would be left to die alone, for indeed she felt that she must die if she lost Carmilla. Without the beautiful stranger, she would turn into dust, her heart would cease to beat and her soul would wither. Life was hateful, and she cried, begging, 'Carmilla, take me with you... please!'

She sagged limply against the stair rail and fell into a convulsing heap at the top of the landing. At the bottom of the stairs Carmilla gently pushed Emma into the alcove, and the girl sagged against the door panel like a rag doll teetering upon the brink of a fall. Turning quickly the beautiful stranger flicked aside the veil of her translucent gown and took to the stairs, flowing up them rather than walking, ascending in a white and furious undulating cloud. The Governess flung out her arm, imploring, and Carmilla merely flicked the limb aside and glared down, her face hard, her eyes cold. She stopped beside the Governess and stooped and knelt to embrace the woman, her thick auburn locks tumbling over Mademoiselle's face. Mademoiselle thought that Carmilla had relented and that now she would kiss her as love's proof, for the beautiful girl's lips pursed wetly and hovered over the other's lips. However, no kiss was delivered. Mademoiselle Perrodon in her tormented agonies saw Carmilla's eyes become harder, narrow and ferocious; they were alight with a spark of hatred and loathing and no mercy glowed therein, no kindness, no love. Although her fine face was a mask of splendid beauty, it now belonged not to the lovely girl, Carmilla, but instead to a dispassionate demon, for the flash of livid ire blazing upon her features was red with the fire of the facetted jewel that hung around her neck. Instead of sympathy the beautiful stranger's visage was twisted up in anger and appeared to collapse inward and then to remould itself. Abruptly Carmilla shuddered, her form splitting and opening like a ghastly flower, a thing that could claim to be neither beast nor human but something abominably wrought between twilit worlds. There are no words that can describe the horror's physicality as it suddenly changed, formed and deformed in the blink of an eye, crouched over the prostrate woman lying helpless in its grasp.

The Governess with wide, panic-stricken eyes witnessed Carmilla's nose divide and peel back into a flat conical muzzle above a thin slash of lips from which protruded a row of triangular razor-sharp fangs. From between those awful lips and awls the tongue extended, a rippling, salivating tongue that flicked rapidly back and forth, forming a wetly obscene and quivering furrowing dart. That tongue flashed down and wiped lasciviously and violently over the woman's face from chin to forehead, from ear to ear, lapping at her skin in a rough and slick stroke that was sickening and sticky. Then it expectorated a vitrified trail of spittle, gummous and slimy, and the hideous organ sealed Mademoiselle Perrodon's mouth in a vile kiss. With the tongue came the stench of a carcass that had rotted into putrefaction and Mademoiselle Perrodon felt the scream and a tide of vomit simultaneously rising in her throat. She tried to thrust her face aside but it was useless for the thing that had been Carmilla held her pinned down, smothering her in a tide of hair that was more bristling animal fur than human locks. Clasped by arms and hands that had become sinewy, strong and claw-like, the Governess screamed. At the bottom of the staircase Emma looked on stunned. Her mind refused to believe the revolting and unbelievable spectacle passing before her eyes. It was a scene that could only be played out in her nightmares, and even such frenzied imaginings, awful as they were, could not compare to the brutal horror that was this. Carmilla, her beautiful guest, was no longer the slim and lovely sylph who sat with her in the evening, who tenderly stroked her cheek, who kissed and embraced her and lulled away the bad dreams with the melody of her soft voice, instead she had been transposed into a monster.

'No!' Mademoiselle Perrodon shrieked, and in that one inarticulate scream was pure terror, born as the beast's tongue forced her lips apart and dived like a bloated slug down her throat. The Governess convulsed and tried to fight the monster off in her feeble struggle to live, but the creature had changed from a beautiful girl into something from the most lurid nightmare, a thing that no longer bore the semblance of the soft female flesh that had lain with her own, that had touched her skin with a sensuous caress. Carmilla had become a monstrous chimera of cat and bat all coalesced within a depraved humanlike coil. The young woman's arms had become thick, elongated and muscled and vaguely winged as they entwined, enwrapped and pinned the Governess to the floor. Carmilla's hands became grasping claws and the tips of her fingers popped and become lethal honed scythes. With a snarl of rage the razor-edged sickles embedded into Mademoiselle Perrodon's breast, going deep and tearing her nightdress away. The woman's naked bosom spilled out of the rent fabric, milky white upon white, and the pink tipped bosom was savagely shredded into a rag of spurting scarlet. Slicing through the soft flesh the claws tore the breast away and raked deeper, deeper in between the victim's ribs and into her beating heart. The Governess stiffened like a beam of oak and choked in her agony, a sound gagged by the foul intrusion of the beast's tongue, and releasing the woman's gasping lips the monster fell upon the torn bosom.

There the abomination fed, gorging at the font of blood, gulping frenziedly at the scarlet jet that shot forth from the wounds, gnashing its ghastly lacerating teeth and throbbing in a spasm as it imbibed. When it lifted its freakish head, and considered the Governess's glazed, staring dead eyes, it dived in a fury upon her throat, ripping its ghastly wide and snapping jaws back and forth as does a mad dog, until the woman's head separated from the torso and tumbled down the stairs. Emma opened her mouth and screamed. The scream was a release from the paralysis that bound her bones and she collapsed against the wall as her cry resounded throughout the now desolate house. There was no one to answer the scream, for both Renton and Gretchin were dead and Emma was now alone with a demon from a nightmare. A tide of blood spilled down the stairs. The severed head bounced in repetitive thuds in its descent, its eyes opening even wider, its lips stretching apart in a hopeless and silent scream. Mademoiselle Perrodon's head rolled to rest at Emma's bare feet, a splash of scarlet spattering her ankles. The sightless eyes glared up at Emma accusingly and the lips gave one last and final quiver of disapproval and Emma Morton swooned upon the brink of fainting. With a violent crash, the door burst inward.

Ebhardt saw Emma falling against the wall, he saw the head of the decapitated Governess spin to a stop at the young girl's feet and he looked up to the scene of carnage on the upper floor. A wave of insanely flapping shades, as of furiously beating wings folded in upon themselves, reassembling a beastly and indescribable image into the frame of the beautiful Carmilla. The transformation happened in the space of a blink, and Ebhardt was not certain if he had really witnessed it at all. There was blood spattered over her nightdress, upon her hands and her breasts, and redly it smeared the woman's lovely lips. Carl felt a shock pass through his body, but nonetheless he stepped forward and drew his glinting sword. His blade sang a high note as it swished from it scabbard and the light glanced from its lethal tip.

'Mircalla!' he shouted, calling the fiend by its birth name, and seeing for the first time since Laura's death the creature that had drained away the life of Laura Spielsdorf. Each recognised the other and the vampire responded, her face again becoming a mask of fury. With the back of her hand she wiped away the blood that stained her mouth and she growled like an animal. Emma began to sob, helpless and with nowhere to flee and no strength left to even crawl away if she could. She felt herself sick in the depths of her being and her mind began slipping into cold. Even so, Carl was here and she closed her eyes and fell to her knees. The vampire glanced toward the coveted object of desire then back again to the young man who had dared interfere. Flicking aside the drape of her filmy robe Carmilla stepped over the headless corpse of the Governess and slowly and deliberately came down the stairs. Her feet squelched in the gore that stained the carpeted steps and she threw back her head with a haughty gesture, half smiling between the row of glistening fangs, and Ebhardt quaked but held his stance, his knuckles turning white about the handle of his blade. He readied himself for the strike. Carmilla threw herself upon him, snarling with a bestial rage that sent a shiver of horror through the young man's body. She snatched at his sword and with one effortless gesture, flicked the weapon aside as though it were a twig. Ebhardt felt his wrist smart with pain as the blade was wrenched from his grasp, and then before he could react, Carmilla held him by the hair, pulling his head down and forcing him upon his knees. Carl's back arched like a bow and Carmilla's grasp was like ice and strong, and the skin in his neck went taut and she gripped harder, her jaws snapping like an animal.

Down they came, those dreadful teeth and grazed his cheek in the descent, and their points indented into his throat, raking the seal of his skin. Ebhardt struggled against the creature, clutching at her, and the two thrashed about in a titan struggle, the young man buckling under her strength, slipping in the red wash of the Governess's blood. Carl tried to reach for his sword, his fingers smearing slippery gore upon the flooring, but the blade had been flung far out of reach, and he heard Emma whimper. Carmilla held him down but in the moment that she could have killed him she paused in her assault and stared past his shoulder at the girl she loved. Emma met Carmilla's eyes and therein she saw sorrow and tears, but she saw horror too, and she looked away as if she had beheld the face of Medusa. Abruptly Carmilla withdrew her poisoned viper's mouth. She now understood what fate has always decreed, that there could be no prize of love though even the dead might love. Her ruse, the galloping black phrency of her father, marshalled to lead Ebhardt astray, had failed. Only savagery was left to her, if she were to survive. Emma at last saw the monster that Carmilla had always been, a thing in the guise of a beautiful girl, a fiend masquerading as her confidant.

'Holy Mother of God, protect me,' Emma sobbed aloud, and Ebhardt felt the vampire's grip lessen. 'Sacred heart of Jesus, save me!'

In that instant of revolting prayer Carmilla knew her failure. Emma, her beloved, had rejected her, and without that love there was only darkness and endless night and no faith and love for the dead. That short but lingering look foretold unto Carmilla the final truth, that she was an abomination and worse, a puppet. For three hundred years she had lived her unnatural existence at the behest of other powers and in those centuries, no one had ever truly loved her, and most certainly Emma never would. All Emma saw now was the monster. Something within Carmilla wished the end of her dark and undead life, and she knew ultimately what she had to do. Even before Ebhardt had invoked his new trust in God and had reached for the dagger at his boot, Carmilla let go her hold of Carl's jet locks and he jerked free from her grasp. The beautiful vampire quickly stepped back. A flash of silver light glanced off the polished iron blade of Ebhardt's dagger, its glowing surface in facsimile of the cross. The young man said a prayer, a rapid couplet of holy lines, to sanctify his blade and he held the dagger with the jewelled hilt high, aiming it at the girl whose shape now backed away. The blade gleamed and the reflected luminance splashed across Carmilla's lovely face, branding her in its cruciform radiance. With a pained sob, the beautiful stranger shut her eyes and with both hands she clasped the fiery ruby that depended from her neck. Through the stone she seemed to make a connection with an ancient magic that bent the fabric of space and reality and time and abruptly her form began to change into a swirling column of smoke.

'Apage Satana!' Ebhardt shouted, holding the dagger up, consecrating his blade wholly so that it became a weapon for the forces of good. At the utterance of Ebhardt's words Emma crumpled to the floor in a swoon. 'Apage Satana!' the young man called again, standing straight as a spear, and in exorcising the revenant he watched with amazement as it retreated further and became translucent. Rushing toward Carmilla, Carl realised he was too late to destroy her. He aimed quickly and flung his blade, but it only flew through air, straight through the dispersing ethereal form of the beautiful Countess, and smashed into a vase, spilling bloom and water and broken china upon the floor. Carmilla had vanished into nothing, not an atom remained of her presence. Then a profound stillness fell over the Morton house and a look of confusion twisted up Ebhardt's handsome face. He could hardly believe what he had just witnessed and he did not know where the demon had gone or by what agency. He turned back to Emma and saw that she lay prostrate on the floor, and stooping he gathered her frail body up and dashed upstairs to her bedroom, the blood on the steps squelching under his boots as he ran. As he lay the cold and pale girl upon her bed he was relieved to see that she was still breathing and he gave a thankful sigh. With swift pace, he went around the bed to pull up the covers and keep her warm, and stepping back he knocked against the dressing table. From its secret place, bound behind the drawer, a hidden book tumbled free and fell to the floor, and Ebhardt reached down and picked it up.

Baron Hartog turned and when he did he glimpsed a wraithlike figure floating between the trees. Quickly he signalled the General and Morton and the men, and all took to hiding behind a thicket. They watched in quiet suspense, silent as the Sylph approached, her feet skimming the ground, the tide of mist folding back at her passing. She glided to the entrance of the castle and paused under the hippogryph, and looked back. Baron Hartog held his breath. After the long passage of forty years he now set his eyes once again upon the girl who had slaughtered his sister, Isabella. Mircalla was unchanged, as graceful and as beautiful as she had been on the day his father had invited her into their abode. As gloriously radiant as the first day that Isabella fell under her enchantment. As Mircalla slipped through the night it became obvious to the men that she knew they were there, that she had smelled their presence in the foetid air; this posse who had come to hunt her down, and kill her. Impassively she turned away and the mist closed over her and she disappeared as does a phantom. When she had gone Baron Hartog waved the men from hiding.

It was cold and foggy when they entered the decrepit and derelict palace, and their search continued throughout its crumbling halls. Baron Hartog felt weary and his joints had begun to ache with the cold, and he wished the night over. If only he had succeeded all those years ago in destroying the Karnstein Countess then his friends would never have suffered their grievous loss. On this night, he felt old and ruined and a failure, and he no longer had the fortitude to rally against the forces of darkness. He feared now that they might have lost her anyway, for the undead were wily and sly. If she eluded them this night she would not return for another forty years and their vengeance upon her would be as nothing. Thus, had he decided to amend his 'History of Evil', before he too died, knowing that if they failed this night, the generations to come could be armed and ready if the monster ever came again to invade Stiria or his homeland of Moravia. He stopped to catch his breath and that breath expelled as mist from his mouth and then he put down his lantern. In another room, before the portrait of Mircalla, Mr. Morton stopped and lingered, studying it and seeing a face that knew of all the depravities that lurked within his skin. Surely it was only paranoid delusion rattling his mind, but regardless he did not enjoy entertaining the thought that this girl should recognise him for that which he truly was, know his dark secret. With a contemptuous sneer he said aloud, 'Only now can I see the evil in her eyes!' Then he glanced away from the portrait in shame, looked to his feet before the beauty in the canvas could see the evil that festered in his.

Looking downward Morton's eyes saw something glowing red in the thin veil of ground mist that was rising about his knees. Between the flagstones a golden thread glinted in the dulled lantern light. Morton gasped and stooped down, and stretched out his trembling fingertips. He picked up a necklace, a jewel, a great, heavy, glowing ruby, and he looked back up to the painting and it was exactly like the jewel that encircled the throat of the girl therein. Morton's mind flashed back to the image of his lovely house guest, and his memory beheld the same ruby as it nestled between her high and shapely breasts, as it dripped upon its chain like a swollen and wetly glistening drop of blood.

'General Spielsdorf!' he exclaimed, jumping up and almost dancing on the spot. 'Over here!'

The General's men brought forth a box from the carriage and from it they took an iron bar and a hammer, and with these they cracked the mortars and hauled back the flagstones. Concealed under the flooring was a long box, a coffin carved from grey-veined marble. The inscription on the lid proclaimed that it was the final bower of the Countess Mircalla Karnstein who had died three hundred years ago. General Spielsdorf wiped the dust from the nameplate and read her appellation aloud. There too was marked the date of her death, that herein was buried a twenty-three-year-old girl all those centuries past.

'Into the chapel,' the Baron indicated. 'Take the handles.' The men each took a handle and with effort they carried the heavy, carved coffin into the deconsecrated church and set it down across the pews. The ancient oak groaned under the stone weight. At the cobweb, festooned altar Mr. Morton righted a golden cross and hypocritically genuflected; a nimble spider scuttled to safety. The Archangel Michael was poised with his righteous sword raised in the dusty leaded window of the Gothic arch above their heads, and in that glass pale flashes of lightning illuminated the grimy coloured murals. With their iron bar, the men pried back the coffin lid. Therein lay supine the beautiful vampire, enwrapped in her grave clothes, still and serene and undead, exposed for ordeal and execution. She floated in a tide of gore. Despite this, how gloriously beautiful was she, her complexion ruddy, her lips crimson, engorged with her victim's life. The vampire lay with her eyes closed, as if comatose, for not a muscle moved, not a nerve twitched. Although she was to be counted among the dead, she looked like one who was living.

Ebhardt held Emma close and she stirred from her faint and clung to him and whimpered. She was white, the colour of a pale-sheeted phantom, having been drained of her vitality, of her blood. Although she was to be counted among the living she looked like one who was dead. The young man whispered to her that everything was all right, but she knew it wouldn't be because the vampire, Carmilla was invincible; no man could best a creature that was so seductive. It had fed upon her blood, she was now part of its being, and although she could not physically see the scene now taking place within the ruin of Karnstein Castle, she could sense its drama. For Emma was now psychically linked to her spectral lover, and it was as if she clearly observed her father and General Spielsdorf through Carmilla's agency. Emma felt every surge of violent energy that the demon emitted, and as she shuddered she shared the monster's regret. Part of Emma understood that Carmilla must now play the sacrifice and that part of her soul did not wish General Spielsdorf to succeed. Yet she was repulsed by the truth that she had been kissed by the lips of Sappho and here was young Ebhardt right beside her, vibrant and virile and handsome. Ebhardt, whose own secrets she did not know, who stroked her hair gently and lay her back upon the pillow. Emma trembled. She witnessed what came next even though she did not share the same space, for she was safe in her home, but Carmilla was not safe in hers, for those men with their stakes and swords, they were the true darkness that roiled within the contested castle. In that space, no woman could ever really be safe.

'I will do it,' the General said in a grave and wrathful tone, and he removed his gloves and peeled back his sleeves and unfurled the shroud that bound the beautiful vampire's body. He looked upon the splendid face and his vision was filled with her loveliness. He could plainly see the shape of her bosoms and the shadow of her sex under the thin material of her burial garb, but such charms held little allure for him.

He was incensed, raged that a mere woman should have bested him, invaded and desecrated his house and destroyed his dreams. The General felt his lips twitch in rile. Baron Hartog handed him a sharp, long and sturdy wooden pike hewn from Mountain Ash. Morton closed his eyes and knelt before the altar and the cross and deceitfully began to pray beneath the vengeful Archangel. General Spielsdorf cast a furious eye upon the Englishman and addressed his friend, the Baron.

'He is praying that his daughter is still alive,' he uttered disparagingly, his voice edged with a barely muted judgmental violence, and then he added, 'I know that Laura is dead.' Spielsdorf raised the stake above Mircalla's breast and it hovered, sharp and lethal just over her left nipple. Emma Morton sat upright in her bed and stared into the ether, caught in the vision of a spectacle that she could not share with Ebhardt, trapped within her own living nightmare. She saw Carmilla, naked in the bath and all those beautiful dresses spread upon the bed. Carmilla laughed and dried her alabaster body and then dressed in her vivid scarlet dress. She was lively and voluptuous and smiling, the essence of life and seduction, and then that vision melted rapidly into another. It was replaced by the picture of Carmilla dressed in her green gown, vowing that she would take care of Emma as though she were her own sister. That emerald dress was the colour of the fresh sprig, the leaf upon which the dew glistened like a tear, and as Carmilla leaned forward with ruby lips to kiss Emma the dress shimmered into pale, sky blue. They were seated in the evening, reading a romance, the wild tale of a torrid love that seemed impossible. Then just like the wind, the image of the beautiful girl had become intangible, dissipated in the air, and like the air she faded and disappeared. Now Carmilla lay wrapped in stainless white, the offering was now her flesh- the sacrifice to these men so that Emma could continue to live in their violent world, a prisoner in her own unhappy life. Emma Morton blinked, but as a somnambulist might blink, trapped in the truth of her vision and she understood that despite Ebhardt's glorious face that he was never going to make her happy.

'Dear God, no!' Emma cried out, but the General could not hear her desperate plea. It was not just a plea for mercy but a ghastly realisation that as Carmilla died, so would part of Emma's own self expire too, her freedom, her liberty, her will would shrivel up and die. The General felt a rush, a charge electric rip through his nerves and muscles and he thrust the stake down with all his might. In that instant, the vampire awoke from her passive undead dreaming. Mircalla's eyes sprang wide and their whites rolled back into their sockets, then she shuddered. She writhed and squirmed with the agility of a snake, and dust motes in the air began to whirl and to gather into her shroud, forming some otherworldly solidity of shape and appearance that was not human. Into the ether the dust began to pour, to ascend, and to churn, spinning in a whorl of sparks and thunder. The airs were altering, becoming host to something indescribable. Baron Hartog looked on in horror. He thought he saw a creature metamorphosing in the air, a phantasm of serous flesh that was darkly aeriform and it bore no semblance to the beautiful girl who had seduced his sister, who now lay in that marble coffin. It was evil incarnate, a conjuration that was impossibly being birthed and was perhaps even more dangerous than it had been in female form. Like the vampire ancestors he had slaughtered all those forty years gone, this one was changing its skin upon the brink of its destruction. Yet there was a surreal grace to this damned thing as it transmuted from the mist and the dust. It weaved like a serpent, seductive and sensual and powerful, solidifying and yet incorporeal. A wave of horror and horrible pleasure tore through Baron Hartog, and for one ghastly moment he was once again in a crypt, his sex held, manipulated in the grasp of the undead, his body defiled.

Mircalla's hand shot up and grasped the General's wrist. The clasp was like a grip of iron and the vampire squeezed hard. The General winced in pain and it felt as if his bones turned to slivers of ice and cracked. He wavered in his strike, and something befouled his senses, clouding up his eyes and his vengeful thoughts. Perhaps there was no stopping the wonder of this creature, despite his hatred, and he began to drink in the marvel and the dark beauty of its form. His body trembled, locked in the struggle but frozen in time, and he was pierced by the strangest arrow of excitement, goaded no less by the thrill of the repulsion and his desire. He could smell the vampire; it was not the foul scent of corruption and death, but the bittersweet perfume of muscle and sinew and blood and of roses and female essence. He stared at her, entranced as her black spirit began taking form in the real world, becoming serous, lithe and sinuous, majestic, exposing a nightmare truth in all its vampiric glory. Whatever matter that comprised its form, it was no less of the elements and somehow faultless and beautiful. General Spielsdorf seemed to know this, even as he despised the beautiful vampire, and to feel an unaccountably strange respect for the creature that she was, for how she had survived for centuries and outwitted many a man. Through lies and deceits but always searching for love, was he not the same creature under his thin layer of human skin, begging the desirous and only falling in a trail of wreckage? Yet it was unthinkable to the General, that this girl should have the power to control him. His world, though irrevocably changed, had to be rid of her.

The vampire's eyes returned to startling blue, and in them the General could see the tiny reflections of himself, and therein she made him recognise his own sin. She understood his secrets, understood his futile love for the young man who had gone to save Roger Morton's daughter, Emma. His love and her love and all love deceived. She sang to the General a Lorelei's song, wormed inside his brain so that his will almost withered. As she sang her pulsing wraith-like physicality begin to slough its misty flesh. It began dropping scales as if they were sparks, a cascade of falling stars and black fire. Here was some hideous strength spawned from a dark nothing. In the General's head time began to slow and hope to shrivel away, and the military man felt his blood upon the brink of boiling in his veins. He was losing his mind, surely, for he felt as if he were upon the edge of offering his own throat to the creature, to be as one with it and to know the ultimate existence, to know all of life's secrets and those of death too and be like unto a dark God. His heart was racing and near bursting. It was a glorious promise that the demon offered, to exist for all eternity, until the sun collapsed and beyond even that singularity, and never to feel the reality of strife or remorse, to sample every delight that the dark world could make possible. The monstrous flapping winged apparition that clouded his vision was changing into its final transmutation, into the shape of bat and feral cat, huge and vicious and slavering. The General was upon the brink of being mesmerised, why, he was not even certain that the vision he beheld was real or even if it were a hallucination shared by his companions. From the roiling clouds in the upward reaches of the vaulted ceiling he saw lightning flashing, the atmospheres whirling with spellbinding beauty, and yet the vision was dreadful in its wonder. Morton looked up from his prayer, for he too imagined he saw a monstrous phantom, and the revelation he beheld pouring into that column of black mist was like unto a spirit, a thing that did not belong to reality, an entity that unfolded huge wings, arched and veined with galvanic levin. It beat its wings angrily and opened the cavernous abyss of its mouth, ready to spew planet-fire down upon every man's flesh. The phantasm bellowed and even Baron Hartog believed his flesh in danger, and he threw his arm across his eyes, blocking what he thought he saw from his sight. No, he did not wish a glimpse of the matter from which the universe was made, that would have refuted all faith and the truth of God.

The apparition flickered with a scintillating kaleidoscope of darkness and ruby reds, a winged phantasy that let loose its fire and bathed the General in blue flame and he knew he had to destroy the vampire. Yet the fire did not touch the man, it did not tear away his skin and there was no agony that he suffered, for in that moment he summoned up his last strength and tore his wrist from Mircalla's grasp of steel and slammed the stake through the woman with all his might. As the spike thrust into Mircalla the girl abruptly sat erect within her coffin and her fingers gripped the timber shaft as it entered in between her ribs. The General might have later sworn that the stake pushed through the vampire's breast, straight through the pink of her nipple, guided by her own hand, and she had half-smiled as the honed point split the target of her heart. The General and Mircalla became melded in that instant. Far away, across the sylvan hills, Ebhardt held Emma Morton, and released from her ghastly visions she opened her mouth and screamed and screamed and screamed. The General thrust the spike deeply into the vampire's bosom and his eyes shut fast so that he did not have to look into her face, nor at the billowing hallucination that seemed to roil above. As the stake smashed through ribs and muscle and erupted through Mircalla's back, a torrent of gore spurted from her torn breast. Blood fountained from the exit wound and Mircalla's visage changed into a face overwritten with agony. Blood spattered upon the General's lips. Mircalla's cry was plaintive, a sound that only the damned forever could make; it erupted from a monster's tongue, raw and intense and it shattered the stained glass in the windows, splitting the Angel Michael into spinning, coloured projectiles. The explosion of glass threw a shower of sharp splinters upon the altar and upon Morton's head where he knelt. An errant shard sliced open his lower lip and his hand flew to his mouth, a splash of blood upon his lips. The marble flagstones in the chapel cracked and split a long fissure directly between Baron Hartog's feet and the old man fell to the side. The coffin lurched and slipped on the pews and pitched downward. Now at an angle and tilting toward the floor, a tide of blood poured over the foot of the box and splashed in a thick, boiling, scarlet river upon the flagstones.

Many kilometres away and beyond the forest, Emma collapsed exhausted into Ebhardt's embrace, and upon the instant that she did so a terrible, howling wind tore a maelstrom about the Karnstein chapel, ripping the tapestries from their rods and whipping the coloured pennants into a mad flapping storm of malice. It was as if Mircalla, in her final agony, was screaming out her love's betrayal, and the mists whirled in vortices and the atmosphere became frozen. As the wind churned upward into the vaulted heights, lightning tipped clouds blackened the ceiling. The creature in the coffin shrieked and its baleful eyes burned with an unholy radiance. A blade of galvanism flashed silver and a titanic clap of thunder boomed in the mountain pass. In that strip of silver light General Spielsdorf was lit from head to toe in a luminance that made his body scintillate with sparks, ringed him with a halo that would have blinded any mortal eye, and both Baron Hartog and Morton shielded their gaze. Mircalla threw up her arms and embraced the General Spielsdorf, her arms locking about his wiry frame like a fleshy trap, and then she threw her head forward and kissed him. Her kiss was a kiss of flame, burning and glorious and it seared his lips and branded his tongue. The General felt the sharp tips of her fangs inside his mouth and the slick darting of her tongue engorged in his throat. The female monster grasped at his crotch, gripping the General's manhood and with a stifled gasp the General responded by thrusting the stake deeper and twisting it as he did so. A strange look of both agony and ecstasy wrote a tale of hideous lies into his gaunt face. He felt his member become involuntarily rigid as she worked it, and he knew his own disgust, yet still, as he drove the pike deep, he climaxed. Mircalla disengaged her mouth and let go, a tide of gore erupted from her lips. The General almost vomited, and a ghastly moan spewed forth from Mircalla's mouth and the vision that all three men seemed to have shared suddenly evaporated. The column of swirling mist retracted and vanished, and Mircalla fell back into the unyielding confines of her box and was still. A look of peace and beatitude swiftly smoothed away the lines of pain that had twisted up her lovely, blood-stained face.

Across the forest, in her bedroom Emma clasped Ebhardt and was held fast in his embrace. They heard the boom of the thunderclap and they shivered in each other's arms. He placed his cheek against her trembling cheek and his lips were warm and moist. Emma's heart beat wildly in its ivory cage.

General Spielsdorf lurched back a step and spat and frantically wiped at his mouth. He had ejaculated and felt supreme shame in the act and Mircalla's kiss had been revolting in its triumph. The taste of that would linger on his lips forever. He straightened his shoulders with a shudder of revulsion and wiped away the vile ribbon of blood that was drooling from his quivering lips. The spittle sizzled and foamed upon his already gore-drenched sleeve. He could taste the creature's putrid fluids sliding over his tongue, taste its quintessence, its female origins, and his mouth turned into a well of salt. He turned and coughed and expectorated one final time upon the cracked flagstones, the mucus disappearing into the reeking tide of gore that had spilled from the coffin. Spielsdorf looked on in disgust as the glob of phlegm foamed and sizzled in the gleet. With a grimmace, the General put away his exposed manhood and placed his sword across the width of the vampire's coffin.

'There's no other way?' he asked of Baron Hartog, his voice suddenly trembling, as if in that moment of profound realisation he had at last encountered his own vulnerability and weakness. Baron Hartog staggered painfully to his feet and shook his head in the negative. The General marshalled the rest of his vigour and gripped the staked creature by the hair and wrenched her supine body upright. She sagged in his grip like a beautiful but torn and broken doll, the lance protruding from her bosom, and the General took up his blade despite the numbing pain he now felt in his wrist. With a righteous sneer, he swung his blade and cut off her head. As the blood spurted forth and the body collapsed with a sickening squelch back into the coffin, Morton crossed himself. Through a blooded lip he uttered up a final prayer to the Lord.

'Let us pray to God,' he pleaded, 'that Stiria has been rid of these devils forever!' He daubed at his own blood with a lace kerchief that he taken from his velvet jacket pocket. The General uncurled his fingers from the cascade of auburn hair and Mircalla's severed head dropped back upon its gory pillow. Baron Hartog stepped forward and looked down at the body in the coffin. Even in death, all blood-spattered and drenched in vile gore, the Countess Mircalla had no rival in beauty among either the living or the dead. He groaned in his heart, a heart still filled with jealous rage, for only he understood that every last one of them, General Spielsdorf, Morton, himself, even young Ebhardt had been bested by this creature. Hartog slipped a trembling hand beneath the thick folds of his cloak and wrenched at the thong that looped about his neck. The leather stretched and snapped and the Baron presented a brass cross for all to view. It was the same cross that had saved his life all those years ago. He saw a look of confusion crease itself into the General's brow. Glancing back to the corpse Baron Joachim von Hartog felt a renewed surge of rage and he remembered how this undead creature had feasted upon the blood of his beloved sister and turned their family home into a charnel house. Without a word Baron Hartog flung the cross into the coffin and there it fell between the rent and transfixed breasts of the vampire, golden in a sea of scarlet, scintillating with sparks of lightning. Without a word, the General signalled that the lid be sealed and the coffin carried to its crypt.

Emma Morton burst into hysterical sobs, and as the tears flowed from her eyes Ebhardt caressed her and tried to reassure her that it was finished and that everything would be all right.

'It's over,' he told her soothingly although he scarce understood how he knew this to be truth. 'It's over.' Emma did not believe him. Deep within her psyche Emma knew the truth, for she remembered the legend of Queen Tera and her jewel of seven stars, and that for something to be finished it had to be destroyed, and even time had difficulty achieving utter obliteration. Tera's evil flesh and blood from the mummy's tomb would never dissipate and she would ultimately rise again… and like that ancient queen so would Carmilla. Emma sobbed, horrified that there may have been a grain of truth to Carmilla's wild tale of ancient Egypt, horrified that Queen Tera and Carmilla might be one and the same entity. If it were true was that then the reason why those priests of antiquity had sought so vehemently for Tera's destruction? A shudder passed through Emma Morton and she sobbed again and even as she quivered Emma knew something else that was even more hideous. The coveted tome she had hidden had slipped from its secret place, the threads that had bound it covert had come undone and it had dropped to the carpet and was revealed it all its lurid treachery. Ebhardt had retrieved it and placed it on the dressing table in plain sight. 'The Lustful Turk' leered at her and accused and now even her handsome young man knew of her pulchritude, knew her desires and her longings, that she was far from pure, sullied. Emma felt shamed, even as she told herself that she had no reason to feel humiliation, and she closed her wet eyes and silently vowed to tear out every page from cover to cover and burn them all.

High up in the mountain the storm finally broke and a light patter of rain began to wash the ancient granite of the tomb of the Countess Mircalla. The bleak night would soon become a grey day and the air had turned bitterly cold. Soon the winter snows would lock the land and swallow it in grief. General Spielsdorf's coachmen helped carry the Countess Mircalla's coffin back to its tomb and the great heavy slab of granite was heaved back into place and the vault was sealed against the dawn. From the periphery of the forest Count Karnstein watched his daughter's imprudent funeral procession and his eyes burned with a fury that was hotter than the sun. In the great hall of the castle Mircalla's portrait began to decay. Paint peeled and blistered, shrivelling on the ancient canvas. What had been the likeness of human-like flesh now revealed the monster that had always festered under Mircalla's skin.

No words in the tongue of humankind could have properly described the thing, for it was of a sentience that was more ancient than the dead human coil of the lovely beauty that it had inhabited three centuries ago. That girl's beautiful visage, rendered by some unremembered artist, began to crack apart and the painted flesh commenced to stream smoke and to collapse into itself, ashes became its hands and tresses, coals expiring became its once sapphire blue eyes. At length, the diluted pigments were no more and the image became what it had always represented, something of the elements, or something beyond the elements, something cosmic and utterly unknowable. The face upon the surface of the canvas expired and turned to dust. When the last grey-tinted stroke had turned Mircalla, the Countess Karnstein into an unrecognisable pile of ashen waste, the canvas shrivelled and sagged and tore in its gilded edging. The frame lurched on its chain and the links snapped. The framework fell to the floor and splintered apart.

Then all was silent.

Epilogue

So It Is For The Dead

In which Baron Hartog writes the final notes in his History of Evil.

Moravia 1830.

The ruins of Karnstein Castle still rise gaunt and menacing above the small hamlet of Stiria, perched on the hilltop like a beast above the chasm. Through its shattered buttresses and broken battlements, the silver beams of the moon will shine and though those mortars slowly crumble into dust the stones will always and forever hold within the shadows. Those shades will throb with the obscenity of all the past violence. Though silence will seep amid the deserted halls, the phallic towers will ring with the echo of dead screams, and the mossy crypts in the graveyard will forever heave beneath a blanket of pulsing fog. The windows will remain darkened and no warm taper shall ever glow therein. Nonetheless, those ruins still conceal the tomb of the beautiful vampire Mircalla, the Countess Karnstein, who died and was reborn and who died again and was yet resurrected. To feed is the sole object of the vampire's desires, to feed the hunger for ardour that consumes its unholy and loathsome existence. As you now are made aware, the unsuspecting victim responds to its disgusting paramour with all the perverse fervour of a devotee. Imagining Mircalla's beguiling countenance once again I was a fool not to see the perversion of depraved love and dissipation. In despair, as I finish this memoriam, I know that Mircalla, who came to us anagrammatically disguised as both Marcilla and Carmilla, has not truly gone to her final rest, but must surely come among us again. I know this because foolish are we to assume that our vengeance was done. Forty years ago, I firmly believed that only a stake through the heart or decapitation could be proof against these demons, but in that I was horribly mistaken. Since then have I learned that although the Karnsteins were pinned to the earth by the stake, and that Mircalla's evil heart was rent asunder, and though her head was separated from her body, we did not burn the monster and we did not cremate the remains of her ancestors, nor did we scatter the consecrated ashes into the wind. Remiss in this awful truth I find myself, and thus I shall forever be at the judgment of humankind for my cowardice and neglect.

The black souls of these demons corrupt all, and I have since read an ancient tract that demands their dissolution can only be made certain after staking and beheading through the purifying fires of immolation. After they have been burnt the ashes must then be sanctified and scattered to the winds. It is by the culmination of that drastic remedy alone that the apparition shall be held in such a state of being that it is prevented from reincarnation, disallowed from haunting the living and to forever remain in limbo. Alas were we all careless, myself and the General Spielsdorf, in our lust for revenge that we did not carry out this final act, but instead sealed the body of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, up once more in its dim granite sepulchre. Thus, so it is that these demons have the power to reawaken.

Sometimes the hue of melancholy colours my brow, and I grieve for the loss of my sweet, sweet sister. Yet perhaps I feel that somewhere in my soul, and from somewhere that lies beyond the grey confines of the tomb, I too am bound by the inexplicable power of the beautiful vampire. Mircalla has been returned to the crypt now for the elapse of four months, and the winter snows melting and the fruits of spring will soon flower into bud in summer's golden weave. The folk of the village of Karnstein will still tend their cattle and their crops and they will fell tall trees in the forest and continue to press wine from the scented grapes of their harvest. At night, they will sleep easier despite the recent tumult and perturbation in their tiny village, but they know the terror must eventually return as it has always returned in the past. They will remain as suspicious and guarded now as they were then, with no faith in my mettle all those forty years ago. I fear for them that the corpse of Mircalla will once again grow fleshy and cast off its shroud and emerge from its musty tumuli. If that happens then woe come upon the pretty daughters of the land.

Know then that this is the nature of the vampire's unnatural existence, and like the peasant folk I am certain that Mircalla will come again, and God help those who shall fall under her spell. God help those who lust for a vampire! Only the pure in heart and those sterling in their resolve, those who truly believe in the just and ultimate power of the Christian God can rise to fight against her. I plead that whosoever reads my 'History of Evil' will forgive my mortal weaknesses and have the courage themselves to be strong where I have failed. All must understand what needs be done to rid the world of this iniquity if it is to be contained. The sons of Adam must arm themselves with the knowledge that will purge the world of this hideous scourge, to strike at its first signs and keep the monster in its grave. Fear may well render their minds insensible, but man is obligated to overcome such terrors if this supernatural agency is to be vanquished. You must avow to yourself that my story is true and not suffer your mind to become complacent upon the facts of which I have endeavoured to warn you. Believe me, through Mircalla are the living doomed by her affections and through the living is she herself eternally damned to seek for love amid the ruins of her own ghastly plight. Mircalla's fate is beyond death, for it is that she must be punished perpetually, and being unnatural and forever restless she is damned never to find happiness. Mircalla's is a deadly desire, unending and passionate, her caress is tender but chilled as if by ice, her kiss is a kiss that kills. Therefore, it is for the living and so it is for the dead… that even the dead seek love.

After the horrors of Stiria I have returned to my own country and the province in which I was born, Frýdek-Místek. From my crumbling manor in the old town of Těšín Silesia, I look out upon a grey world. Here I remain in my chamber and rarely go out. Age finds me unable or perhaps unwilling to venture forth into the world, and instead I look out through the windows with weary eyes and I watch as winter's bitter kiss is mine. Nonetheless, my mind is still sharp and I am not distracted nor is my heart so sullied as to lack tenderness and compassion. Writing this addendum in the hope that it may serve the future generations, I find that it is only my hand that shakes, and that after a while I can scarce hold the pen, but these writings are far from romantic and I must have them completed. Before God may we be spared from these supernatural happenings again. Face to face and twice have I met with the Devil's own accomplice, and she herself under the domination of malefic demons. Nevertheless, when I recall the face of the beautiful undead who ravished and murdered my sister, Isabella, I see Mircalla's blue and shining eyes. Looking deeper, I see that the colour of a cloudless sky masks the blackness of the beast that hideth within. That face I must forever recollect with bitter remorse and still to this day I am torn with suffering. I plead with God that he may forgive me my trespasses, forgive me before the moment when I at last sink lifeless upon his bosom, and that he know of my solemn regrets. In memory of the people I love, thus ends my account of the fearsome Karnsteins.

Prelude

Lust For A Vampire

In which a black coach stalks the Stirian countryside and a pretty peasant girl unwisely accepts a ride.

The pretty peasant girl skipped out of the tavern, a woven basket on her arm and a smile radiant upon her lips.

'Stay a while longer,' the handsome village lad pleaded, gently holding on to the pretty girl's hand. She smiled again and her rosy cheeks dimpled. She shook her head, her golden hair shining in the warm afternoon sunlight. Reluctantly she pulled her hand free. The pretty village girl would have liked nothing better than to stay for a bit longer at the tavern and share a kiss with her beau, but she dared not. At that moment, the tavern wench brought the village girl a tray of knotted breads, apples and three jars of beer from the scullery.

'Thank you, Trudi,' she simpered, and Trudi gave a polite smile. Trudi was pretty too, and possessed of a high, firm cleavage. The village men often found themselves staring at her breasts and going glassy eyed. Trudi merely shrugged and turned on her heel. She didn't care at all for such silly, secret meetings and she had no designs on the young man whatsoever. She briskly walked inside the tavern and the peasant girl was quiet until the wench was gone.

'Stay a while longer, the young man implored, lightly clasping the peasant girl's slender forearm.

'I can't. My father gets angry if dinner is late,' she said, winking at the young man and smiling. She knew that it was important to have the hay ricked, and the village men would be working hard in the fields near the Bullheimer estate, working hard to fill the new barn for the onset of the coming cold of winter. The men would be hungry. The village girl wrapped the food in a gingham cloth and then placed it carefully alongside the chinking bottles into the basket.

'Shall I see you tonight?' asked the village lad.

'Perhaps,' the girl replied, thinking already of a way that she might be able to sneak out. She would make an excuse, tell her father that she was going to make a late afternoon visit to her friend Petra, but instead she would skip through the forest and meet with her young man. With a happy giggle she strolled off, her basket looped over her arm, leaving the tavern and her beau and the village behind, and skirting the forest, she headed for the yellow fields where her father would be threshing the hay. As she skipped along she passed through the wooded park and emerged into an open glade. Here wildflowers bobbed their purple heads and the green grass rippled in a wave of shadow as the sun suddenly dipped behind a cloud. The weather had been inclement and rather unpredictable of late, and it would only be but a month before the cold snows of winter fell upon the leas. The girl glanced up to the louring sky. She saw a stormy cloud brewing and a faint streak of silver lightning over the mountains. Up there, squatting under the sky dome she saw the silhouette of the ruined castle illuminated by the glow of the lightning. The girl told herself that perhaps she had best hurry, and she began to walk a little faster through the clearing, heading for the open road.

Upon the fringe of the wood stood a motionless coach, its compartment a space as still and as black as midnight, and its door was open. The girl did not see the coach nor did she see the figure, clad from head to foot in a flowing black cloak that hovered beside the door. As if upon an unspoken signal the figure ascended soundlessly into the carriage, although no hand or limb seemed to touch either step or door. The portal clicked closed of its own volition and the figure vanished into the dark. A chilly wind swept down from the mountains and shook the longer grass and sighed in the trees beyond the dell. The wild flowers bent their heads and the gust winnowed bark from trunk and scattered leaves into swirling vortices. The village girl shuddered as the wind brushed her skin, and she felt the chill and regretted that she had not thought to don a shawl. In that very moment, the black coach drew silently alongside the girl. She did not stop to think that it was strange that the hoofs of the two black horses that drew the carriage made no sound upon the earth. The coach stopped and the driver looked down from his box, a long whip in his hand. The maiden smiled up at the coachman, and although she only caught but a glimpse, his face was swarthy and mysterious, foreign perhaps, shadowy under the brim of his hat. He did not bestow a smile upon her, but his eyes were hard and piercing. A strange beast was etched into the crest on the coach door, a fanged monster emblazoned in blue and red and gold, and a dark shape moved behind the window glass. The village girl glimpsed the shadow as it fluttered within, a vagary in the dim interior, and the door of the carriage opened. A slim white arm extended and a slim white hand signalled a welcome to the girl to climb into the coach. Looking up the pretty peasant glimpsed a seated figure in the plush blue upholstery, a figure dressed in a scarlet gown and a long flowing black cape with a hood that was drawn about the face. That face was concealed under the murky dimness of its cowl and the village girl could not clearly define any features. There was a flash of white teeth as the figure smiled from the shadows and a woman's voice, sweet and gentle and musical declared in a dulcet tone that it looked as if the weather would soon turn nasty. She kindly offered the girl a ride, and the maiden obliged, thrilled, for she had never ridden in a coach before, and with the basket still looped over her arm she climbed up into the velvet-buttoned compartment. The door closed upon her as she sat next to the figure that had spoken and the coachman abruptly cracked his whip.

A volt of lightning cut a liquid path to the earth and the horses lurched forth in a wild gallop. There was another cloaked figure within the carriage, one that the girl had not seen, and as the team bolted frenziedly the shape sprang up within the darkness and it spread its arms as if they were wings. Startled, the village girl threw down her basket and screamed. The blackness enfolded her and smothered her cry and she fainted away into merciless, endless night. Up the road and through the forest the carriage flew like the wind, cresting the hill to the castle ruin that stood high and black against the louring sky. Therein that ruin her body would be taken to the desanctified chapel and there spread upon a profane altar and her throat would be slit, her fresh, warm blood the new life-giving elixir for a return of the damned. This virgin sacrifice would herald a new resurrection for the fearsome Karnstiens, and the young pure blood would fill a golden chalice and it would spill upon the ashes of the dormant Mircalla. Thus, will the beautiful monster walk the earth once more, raised like the phoenix, born anew and unconquerable, to stalk again for victims, to lust again and to kill again. For there can be no rest for the vampire lovers.