Let's Read: Carmilla!
Part Three: Chapter Nine through Chapter Twelve.
This is Part Three of Let’s Read: Carmilla. See this post for more information & a reading schedule.
Previously: Part One & Part Two.
Hi, friends, and happy Sunday.
I’ve hit the point where it’s all clearly coming to a head, and I had to FORCE myself to stop reading when I got to the end of this segment. Always a good sign in a book!
CHAPTER IX. The Doctor
In which Laura’s father starts taking things seriously.
• To avoid any further sleepwalking shenanigans, Laura’s father has arranged for one of the servants to sleep just outside Carmilla’s door.
• The next day, the doctor arrives. He’s come at the request of Laura’s father to check on her, because he’s worried. I’d like to know if this behavioral change—up until now he’s seemed nice, but dim?—is due to him having been Playing It Cool, or due to Plotting Necessity. Because we’re at the halfway mark.
• She tells the doctor everything, and he doesn’t like what he’s hearing. Then, the doctor goes to speak with Laura’s father privately—God forbid he talk to the person whose body it is he’s discussing, but whatever—and from what she can see, her father doesn’t like what HE’S hearing, either.
• They call her over, she pulls her collar down at their request, and reveals a “small blue dot” in the same place that she’s been feeling “two needles piercing” her skin. Evidently, the doctor had told Laura’s father that it would be there, and now, seeing it, Laura’s father is convinced of… well, whatever else the doctor told him.
• For now, the only action they appear to be taking is to instruct the older of the two governesses to stick with Laura at all times. I love that Laura is basically rolling her eyes and Okay Boomer-ing the adults:
The interpretation did not strike me; and I fancied, perhaps luckily for my nerves, that the arrangement was prescribed simply to secure a companion, who would prevent my taking too much exercise, or eating unripe fruit, or doing any of the fifty foolish things to which young people are supposed to be prone.
• As Carmilla appears to have the same symptoms, the doctor and Laura’s father make plans for the doctor to come back around dinnertime, so that he can examine Carmilla (she’s still in bed). I’m sure that’ll go great?
• This is the crabbiest—and most high-handed—he’s been thus far:
“But do tell me, papa,” I insisted, “what does he think is the matter with me?”
“Nothing; you must not plague me with questions,” he answered, with more irritation than I ever remember him to have displayed before; and seeing that I looked wounded, I suppose, he kissed me, and added, “You shall know all about it in a day or two; that is, all that I know. In the meantime you are not to trouble your head about it.”
DON’T TROUBLE YOUR PRETTY LITTLE HEAD ABOUT IT, IT’S JUST YOUR BODY AND YOUR HEALTH, THE MEN WILL TAKE CARE OF IT, NO WORRIES
• Additionally, he has also turned into Action Dad—I feel like he’s done more in this chapter than he had in the previous eight combined?:
He turned and left the room, but came back before I had done wondering and puzzling over the oddity of all this; it was merely to say that he was going to Karnstein, and had ordered the carriage to be ready at twelve, and that I and Madame should accompany him; he was going to see the priest who lived near those picturesque grounds, upon business, and as Carmilla had never seen them, she could follow, when she came down, with Mademoiselle, who would bring materials for what you call a picnic, which might be laid for us in the ruined castle.
• On their way out, they run into General Spielsdorf—he’s the guy from the beginning whose niece was presumably eaten by Carmilla—and he decides to join them in their visit to Karnstein.
CHAPTER X. Bereaved
In which the General has a lot of feelings.
• The General, in his grief, is prone to ranting:
We had not long resumed our drive, when the General began to talk, with his usual soldierly directness, of the bereavement, as he termed it, which he had sustained in the death of his beloved niece and ward; and he then broke out in a tone of intense bitterness and fury, inveighing against the “hellish arts” to which she had fallen a victim, and expressing, with more exasperation than piety, his wonder that Heaven should tolerate so monstrous an indulgence of the lusts and malignity of hell.
• The General used to be a Scully, but is now a Mulder:
“Because,” he answered testily, “you believe in nothing but what consists with your own prejudices and illusions. I remember when I was like you, but I have learned better.”
• The General has PLANS for the Karnstein tombs… and the bodies within them:
“Something very different,” he said, gruffly. “I mean to unearth some of those fine people. I hope, by God’s blessing, to accomplish a pious sacrilege here, which will relieve our earth of certain monsters, and enable honest people to sleep in their beds without being assailed by murderers. I have strange things to tell you, my dear friend, such as I myself would have scouted as incredible a few months since.”
All that, and he DIDN’T TELL HIS STORY!
Movie interlude: Vampyres (José Ramón Larraz, 1974)
I almost don’t even know where to start with this one. So I guess with two unrelated thoughts:
This is the third movie I’ve watched from this director this season. Edge of the Axe, from 1988, was unexpectedly AWESOME and featured a romance that was carried out via computer, and nothing made a whole lot of sense but I didn’t care because the whole thing was just bananas. Josh and I both agreed that it’s one that we’ll be watching again for sure.
This one features vampires who don’t have pointy teeth, and I think that sort of vampire is way scarier than the other, because puncture wounds are positively dainty compared to the damage that regular human teeth do. THAT SAID, these ladies mostly use a knife and then… do a lot of lapping. And when I say it is A LOT, I mean both in terms of quantity and grossness.
Actually, there’s a lot of tongue business in general, and all of that is A LOT as well. For fans of the Again with This podcast: You know how they complained (totally fairly) about the horrorshow that is Brandon Walsh’s kissing technique, which is to say that it always looked like he was about to unhinge his jaw and attempt to swallow his kissing partner whole? Yeah, well, the kissing in this one made him look refined.
Mostly, the human characters made choices in this one that suggested to me that they were TRYING to get eaten and/or murdered, and I have one MAJOR nagging question about the plotting, but for the most part, I was VERY into this largely sedate story about A Vampire Lady Couple that picks up random dudes and parties with them for a while and then eats them.
According to the Wikipedia page, the uncut version of this one was released in the US with an X rating in 1975. It was first released in the UK with about two and a half minutes cut, and the director referred to that as “the Vatican version”. Heh. Lots and lots of nudity and sex, and not a TON of violence and gore, but when it’s there, it’s THERE.
CHAPTER XI. The Story
In which the General begins his story... and elements of it are Strangely Familiar.
• The General and his niece were at a masquerade ball, and they met two women—one older, one younger:
“My dear child was looking quite beautiful. She wore no mask. Her excitement and delight added an unspeakable charm to her features, always lovely. I remarked a young lady, dressed magnificently, but wearing a mask, who appeared to me to be observing my ward with extraordinary interest. I had seen her, earlier in the evening, in the great hall, and again, for a few minutes, walking near us, on the terrace under the castle windows, similarly employed. A lady, also masked, richly and gravely dressed, and with a stately air, like a person of rank, accompanied her as a chaperon.
Had the young lady not worn a mask, I could, of course, have been much more certain upon the question whether she was really watching my poor darling.
I am now well assured that she was.
• OKAY CARMILLA, LET’S DO SOME WORK ON THE WHOLE ALIAS THING, BECAUSE THIS IS STARTING TO FEEL LAZY:
“In the meantime the young lady, whom her mother called by the odd name of Millarca, when she once or twice addressed her, had, with the same ease and grace, got into conversation with my ward.
• Anyway, long story short, even though he can’t place her, the older lady claims to know the General, and that they go way back:
“She laughed, and she would, no doubt, have met me with another evasion—if, indeed, I can treat any occurrence in an interview every circumstance of which was prearranged, as I now believe, with the profoundest cunning, as liable to be modified by accident.
• But as they’re talking, a man “dressed in black, who looked particularly elegant and distinguished, with this drawback, that his face was the most deadly pale I ever saw, except in death” pulls the lady away from the General for a Serious Talk.
CHAPTER XII. A Petition
In which it is decided that Carmilla—sorry, MILLARCA—will stay with the General and his niece for three weeks.
• I’m starting to feel that there should be more stories about vampire grifters. Because these ladies have a SYSTEM:
I shall in three weeks pass your beautiful schloss, about which I have been making enquiries. I shall then look in upon you for an hour or two, and renew a friendship which I never think of without a thousand pleasant recollections. This moment a piece of news has reached me like a thunderbolt. I must set out now, and travel by a devious route, nearly a hundred miles, with all the dispatch I can possibly make. My perplexities multiply. I am only deterred by the compulsory reserve I practice as to my name from making a very singular request of you. My poor child has not quite recovered her strength. Her horse fell with her, at a hunt which she had ridden out to witness, her nerves have not yet recovered the shock, and our physician says that she must on no account exert herself for some time to come.
• Same instructions that Laura’s dad was given:
“Her last charge to me was that no attempt was to be made to learn more about her than I might have already guessed, until her return.
• So Millarca’s “mother” takes off into the night, leaving Millarca in the care of the General and his niece. They enjoy the rest of the ball, which roars until almost sunrise, when:
“We had just got through a crowded saloon, when my ward asked me what had become of Millarca. I thought she had been by her side, and she fancied she was by mine. The fact was, we had lost her.
“All my efforts to find her were vain. I feared that she had mistaken, in the confusion of a momentary separation from us, other people for her new friends, and had, possibly, pursued and lost them in the extensive grounds which were thrown open to us.
• Millarca’s disappearance prompts the General to wonder if maybe it wasn’t a GREAT idea to take responsibility for some random young woman based on the word of a lady who he really wasn’t sure if he even knew… but eventually around two in the afternoon, Millarca reappears:
“She told my poor child a story to account for her having failed to recover us for so long. Very late, she said, she had got to the housekeeper’s bedroom in despair of finding us, and had then fallen into a deep sleep which, long as it was, had hardly sufficed to recruit her strength after the fatigues of the ball.
“That day Millarca came home with us. I was only too happy, after all, to have secured so charming a companion for my dear girl.”
The chapter ends here, and I’m actually really surprised that the General ends on this note, as he’s previously been EXTREMELY into peppering his narrative with Darkly Foreboding Commentary, and this feels like the perfect place for something along the lines of OH WOE THAT CHARMING FACE MASKED A FIENDISH HEART IF I’D ONLY BUT KNOWN, etc., etc., etc.
Finishing up next time!!
(I’m kind of excited, are they going to legit go tomb spelunking??)
Talk to you soon,
Leila