<h2><SPAN name="chap13"></SPAN>XIII.<br/> The Woodman</h2>
<p>“There soon, however, appeared some drawbacks. In the first place,
Millarca complained of extreme languor—the weakness that remained after
her late illness—and she never emerged from her room till the afternoon
was pretty far advanced. In the next place, it was accidentally discovered,
although she always locked her door on the inside, and never disturbed the key
from its place till she admitted the maid to assist at her toilet, that she was
undoubtedly sometimes absent from her room in the very early morning, and at
various times later in the day, before she wished it to be understood that she
was stirring. She was repeatedly seen from the windows of the schloss, in the
first faint grey of the morning, walking through the trees, in an easterly
direction, and looking like a person in a trance. This convinced me that she
walked in her sleep. But this hypothesis did not solve the puzzle. How did she
pass out from her room, leaving the door locked on the inside? How did she
escape from the house without unbarring door or window?</p>
<p>“In the midst of my perplexities, an anxiety of a far more urgent kind
presented itself.</p>
<p>“My dear child began to lose her looks and health, and that in a manner
so mysterious, and even horrible, that I became thoroughly frightened.</p>
<p>“She was at first visited by appalling dreams; then, as she fancied, by a
specter, sometimes resembling Millarca, sometimes in the shape of a beast,
indistinctly seen, walking round the foot of her bed, from side to side.</p>
<p>Lastly came sensations. One, not unpleasant, but very peculiar, she said,
resembled the flow of an icy stream against her breast. At a later time, she
felt something like a pair of large needles pierce her, a little below the
throat, with a very sharp pain. A few nights after, followed a gradual and
convulsive sense of strangulation; then came unconsciousness.”</p>
<p>I could hear distinctly every word the kind old General was saying, because by
this time we were driving upon the short grass that spreads on either side of
the road as you approach the roofless village which had not shown the smoke of
a chimney for more than half a century.</p>
<p>You may guess how strangely I felt as I heard my own symptoms so exactly
described in those which had been experienced by the poor girl who, but for the
catastrophe which followed, would have been at that moment a visitor at my
father’s chateau. You may suppose, also, how I felt as I heard him detail
habits and mysterious peculiarities which were, in fact, those of our beautiful
guest, Carmilla!</p>
<p>A vista opened in the forest; we were on a sudden under the chimneys and gables
of the ruined village, and the towers and battlements of the dismantled castle,
round which gigantic trees are grouped, overhung us from a slight eminence.</p>
<p>In a frightened dream I got down from the carriage, and in silence, for we had
each abundant matter for thinking; we soon mounted the ascent, and were among
the spacious chambers, winding stairs, and dark corridors of the castle.</p>
<p>“And this was once the palatial residence of the Karnsteins!” said
the old General at length, as from a great window he looked out across the
village, and saw the wide, undulating expanse of forest. “It was a bad
family, and here its bloodstained annals were written,” he continued.
“It is hard that they should, after death, continue to plague the human
race with their atrocious lusts. That is the chapel of the Karnsteins, down
there.”</p>
<p>He pointed down to the grey walls of the Gothic building partly visible through
the foliage, a little way down the steep. “And I hear the axe of a
woodman,” he added, “busy among the trees that surround it; he
possibly may give us the information of which I am in search, and point out the
grave of Mircalla, Countess of Karnstein. These rustics preserve the local
traditions of great families, whose stories die out among the rich and titled
so soon as the families themselves become extinct.”</p>
<p>“We have a portrait, at home, of Mircalla, the Countess Karnstein; should
you like to see it?” asked my father.</p>
<p>“Time enough, dear friend,” replied the General. “I believe
that I have seen the original; and one motive which has led me to you earlier
than I at first intended, was to explore the chapel which we are now
approaching.”</p>
<p>“What! see the Countess Mircalla,” exclaimed my father; “why,
she has been dead more than a century!”</p>
<p>“Not so dead as you fancy, I am told,” answered the General.</p>
<p>“I confess, General, you puzzle me utterly,” replied my father,
looking at him, I fancied, for a moment with a return of the suspicion I
detected before. But although there was anger and detestation, at times, in the
old General’s manner, there was nothing flighty.</p>
<p>“There remains to me,” he said, as we passed under the heavy arch
of the Gothic church—for its dimensions would have justified its being so
styled—“but one object which can interest me during the few years
that remain to me on earth, and that is to wreak on her the vengeance which, I
thank God, may still be accomplished by a mortal arm.”</p>
<p>“What vengeance can you mean?” asked my father, in increasing
amazement.</p>
<p>“I mean, to decapitate the monster,” he answered, with a fierce
flush, and a stamp that echoed mournfully through the hollow ruin, and his
clenched hand was at the same moment raised, as if it grasped the handle of an
axe, while he shook it ferociously in the air.</p>
<p>“What?” exclaimed my father, more than ever bewildered.</p>
<p>“To strike her head off.”</p>
<p>“Cut her head off!”</p>
<p>“Aye, with a hatchet, with a spade, or with anything that can cleave
through her murderous throat. You shall hear,” he answered, trembling
with rage. And hurrying forward he said:</p>
<p>“That beam will answer for a seat; your dear child is fatigued; let her
be seated, and I will, in a few sentences, close my dreadful story.”</p>
<p>The squared block of wood, which lay on the grass-grown pavement of the chapel,
formed a bench on which I was very glad to seat myself, and in the meantime the
General called to the woodman, who had been removing some boughs which leaned
upon the old walls; and, axe in hand, the hardy old fellow stood before us.</p>
<p>He could not tell us anything of these monuments; but there was an old man, he
said, a ranger of this forest, at present sojourning in the house of the
priest, about two miles away, who could point out every monument of the old
Karnstein family; and, for a trifle, he undertook to bring him back with him,
if we would lend him one of our horses, in little more than half an hour.</p>
<p>“Have you been long employed about this forest?” asked my father of
the old man.</p>
<p>“I have been a woodman here,” he answered in his patois,
“under the forester, all my days; so has my father before me, and so on,
as many generations as I can count up. I could show you the very house in the
village here, in which my ancestors lived.”</p>
<p>“How came the village to be deserted?” asked the General.</p>
<p>“It was troubled by revenants, sir; several were tracked to their graves,
there detected by the usual tests, and extinguished in the usual way, by
decapitation, by the stake, and by burning; but not until many of the villagers
were killed.</p>
<p>“But after all these proceedings according to law,” he
continued—“so many graves opened, and so many vampires deprived of
their horrible animation—the village was not relieved. But a Moravian
nobleman, who happened to be traveling this way, heard how matters were, and
being skilled—as many people are in his country—in such affairs, he
offered to deliver the village from its tormentor. He did so thus: There being
a bright moon that night, he ascended, shortly after sunset, the towers of the
chapel here, from whence he could distinctly see the churchyard beneath him;
you can see it from that window. From this point he watched until he saw the
vampire come out of his grave, and place near it the linen clothes in which he
had been folded, and then glide away towards the village to plague its
inhabitants.</p>
<p>“The stranger, having seen all this, came down from the steeple, took the
linen wrappings of the vampire, and carried them up to the top of the tower,
which he again mounted. When the vampire returned from his prowlings and missed
his clothes, he cried furiously to the Moravian, whom he saw at the summit of
the tower, and who, in reply, beckoned him to ascend and take them. Whereupon
the vampire, accepting his invitation, began to climb the steeple, and so soon
as he had reached the battlements, the Moravian, with a stroke of his sword,
clove his skull in twain, hurling him down to the churchyard, whither,
descending by the winding stairs, the stranger followed and cut his head off,
and next day delivered it and the body to the villagers, who duly impaled and
burnt them.</p>
<p>“This Moravian nobleman had authority from the then head of the family to
remove the tomb of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, which he did effectually, so
that in a little while its site was quite forgotten.”</p>
<p>“Can you point out where it stood?” asked the General, eagerly.</p>
<p>The forester shook his head, and smiled.</p>
<p>“Not a soul living could tell you that now,” he said;
“besides, they say her body was removed; but no one is sure of that
either.”</p>
<p>Having thus spoken, as time pressed, he dropped his axe and departed, leaving
us to hear the remainder of the General’s strange story.</p>
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