Best Horror Novels

Chapter 13 The Woodman

Chapter 13

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

place, Millarca complained of extreme languor—the weakness that

remained after her late illness—and she never emerged from her room

till the afternoon was pretty far advanced. In the next place, it

was accidentally discovered, although she always locked her door on

the inside, and never disturbed the key from its place till she

admitted the maid to assist at her toilet, that she was undoubtedly

sometimes absent from her room in the very early morning, and at

various times later in the day, before she wished it to be

understood that she was stirring. She was repeatedly seen from the

windows of the schloss, in the first faint grey of the morning,

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

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

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

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

did she escape from the house without unbarring door or window?

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

urgent kind presented itself.

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

manner so mysterious, and even horrible, that I became thoroughly

frightened.

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

fancied, by a specter, sometimes resembling Millarca, sometimes in

the shape of a beast, indistinctly seen, walking round the foot of

her bed, from side to side.

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

she said, resembled the flow of an icy stream against her breast.

At a later time, she felt something like a pair of large needles

pierce her, a little below the throat, with a very sharp pain. A

few nights after, followed a gradual and convulsive sense of

strangulation; then came unconsciousness."

I could hear distinctly every word the kind old General was

saying, because by this time we were driving upon the short grass

that spreads on either side of the road as you approach the

roofless village which had not shown the smoke of a chimney for

more than half a century.

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

exactly described in those which had been experienced by the poor

girl who, but for the catastrophe which followed, would have been

at that moment a visitor at my father's chateau. You may suppose,

also, how I felt as I heard him detail habits and mysterious

peculiarities which were, in fact, those of our beautiful guest,

Carmilla!

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

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

battlements of the dismantled castle, round which gigantic trees

are grouped, overhung us from a slight eminence.

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.

"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."

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."

"We have a portrait, at home, of Mircalla, the Countess

Karnstein; should you like to see it?" asked my father.

"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."

"What! see the Countess Mircalla," exclaimed my father; "why,

she has been dead more than a century!"

"Not so dead as you fancy, I am told," answered the General.

"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.

"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."

"What vengeance can you mean?" asked my father, in increasing

amazement.

"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.

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

"To strike her head off."

"Cut her head off!"

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

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

trembling with rage. And hurrying forward he said:

"That beam will answer for a seat; your dear child is fatigued;

let her be seated, and I will, in a few sentences, close my

dreadful story."

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

of the chapel, formed a bench on which I was very glad to seat

myself, and in the meantime the General called to the woodman, who

had been removing some boughs which leaned upon the old walls; and,

axe in hand, the hardy old fellow stood before us.

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

an old man, he said, a ranger of this forest, at present sojourning

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

out every monument of the old Karnstein family; and, for a trifle,

he undertook to bring him back with him, if we would lend him one

of our horses, in little more than half an hour.

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

of the old man.

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

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

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

house in the village here, in which my ancestors lived."

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

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

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

in the usual way, by decapitation, by the stake, and by burning;

but not until many of the villagers were killed.

"But after all these proceedings according to law," he

continued—"so many graves opened, and so many vampires deprived of

their horrible animation—the village was not relieved. But a

Moravian nobleman, who happened to be traveling this way, heard how

matters were, and being skilled—as many people are in his

country—in such affairs, he offered to deliver the village from its

tormentor. He did so thus: There being a bright moon that night, he

ascended, shortly after sunset, the towers of the chapel here, from

whence he could distinctly see the churchyard beneath him; you can

see it from that window. From this point he watched until he saw

the vampire come out of his grave, and place near it the linen

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

the village to plague its inhabitants.

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

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

top of the tower, which he again mounted. When the vampire returned

from his prowlings and missed his clothes, he cried furiously to

the Moravian, whom he saw at the summit of the tower, and who, in

reply, beckoned him to ascend and take them. Whereupon the vampire,

accepting his invitation, began to climb the steeple, and so soon

as he had reached the battlements, the Moravian, with a stroke of

his sword, clove his skull in twain, hurling him down to the

churchyard, whither, descending by the winding stairs, the stranger

followed and cut his head off, and next day delivered it and the

body to the villagers, who duly impaled and burnt them.

"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."

"Can you point out where it stood?" asked the General,

eagerly.

The forester shook his head, and smiled.

"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."

Having thus spoken, as time pressed, he dropped his axe and

departed, leaving us to hear the remainder of the General's strange

story.