Best Horror Novels

Chapter 16 Conclusion

Chapter 16

ConclusionI write all this you suppose with composure. But far from it; I

cannot think of it without agitation. Nothing but your earnest

desire so repeatedly expressed, could have induced me to sit down

to a task that has unstrung my nerves for months to come, and

reinduced a shadow of the unspeakable horror which years after my

deliverance continued to make my days and nights dreadful, and

solitude insupportably terrific.

Let me add a word or two about that quaint Baron Vordenburg, to

whose curious lore we were indebted for the discovery of the

Countess Mircalla's grave.

He had taken up his abode in Gratz, where, living upon a mere

pittance, which was all that remained to him of the once princely

estates of his family, in Upper Styria, he devoted himself to the

minute and laborious investigation of the marvelously authenticated

tradition of Vampirism. He had at his fingers' ends all the great

and little works upon the subject.

"Magia Posthuma," "Phlegon de Mirabilibus," "Augustinus de cura

pro Mortuis," "Philosophicae et Christianae Cogitationes de

Vampiris," by John Christofer Herenberg; and a thousand others,

among which I remember only a few of those which he lent to my

father. He had a voluminous digest of all the judicial cases, from

which he had extracted a system of principles that appear to

govern—some always, and others occasionally only—the condition of

the vampire. I may mention, in passing, that the deadly pallor

attributed to that sort of revenants, is a mere melodramatic

fiction. They present, in the grave, and when they show themselves

in human society, the appearance of healthy life. When disclosed to

light in their coffins, they exhibit all the symptoms that are

enumerated as those which proved the vampire-life of the long-dead

Countess Karnstein.

How they escape from their graves and return to them for certain

hours every day, without displacing the clay or leaving any trace

of disturbance in the state of the coffin or the cerements, has

always been admitted to be utterly inexplicable. The amphibious

existence of the vampire is sustained by daily renewed slumber in

the grave. Its horrible l**t for living blood supplies the vigor of

its waking existence. The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an

engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular

persons. In pursuit of these it will exercise inexhaustible

patience and stratagem, for access to a particular object may be

obstructed in a hundred ways. It will never desist until it has

satiated its passion, and drained the very life of its coveted

victim. But it will, in these cases, husband and protract its

murderous enjoyment with the refinement of an epicure, and heighten

it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship. In these cases

it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. In

ordinary ones it goes direct to its object, overpowers with

violence, and strangles and exhausts often at a single feast.

The vampire is, apparently, subject, in certain situations, to

special conditions. In the particular instance of which I have

given you a relation, Mircalla seemed to be limited to a name

which, if not her real one, should at least reproduce, without the

omission or addition of a single letter, those, as we say,

anagrammatically, which compose it.

Carmilla did this; so did Millarca.

My father related to the Baron Vordenburg, who remained with us

for two or three weeks after the expulsion of Carmilla, the story

about the Moravian nobleman and the vampire at Karnstein

churchyard, and then he asked the Baron how he had discovered the

exact position of the long-concealed tomb of the Countess Mircalla?

The Baron's grotesque features puckered up into a mysterious smile;

he looked down, still smiling on his worn spectacle case and

fumbled with it. Then looking up, he said:

"I have many journals, and other papers, written by that

remarkable man; the most curious among them is one treating of the

visit of which you speak, to Karnstein. The tradition, of course,

discolors and distorts a little. He might have been termed a

Moravian nobleman, for he had changed his abode to that territory,

and was, beside, a noble. But he was, in truth, a native of Upper

Styria. It is enough to say that in very early youth he had been a

passionate and favored lover of the beautiful Mircalla, Countess

Karnstein. Her early death plunged him into inconsolable grief. It

is the nature of vampires to increase and multiply, but according

to an ascertained and ghostly law.

"Assume, at starting, a territory perfectly free from that pest.

How does it begin, and how does it multiply itself? I will tell

you. A person, more or less wicked, puts an end to himself. A

suicide, under certain circumstances, becomes a vampire. That

specter visits living people in their slumbers; they die, and

almost invariably, in the grave, develop into vampires. This

happened in the case of the beautiful Mircalla, who was haunted by

one of those demons. My ancestor, Vordenburg, whose title I still

bear, soon discovered this, and in the course of the studies to

which he devoted himself, learned a great deal more.

"Among other things, he concluded that suspicion of vampirism

would probably fall, sooner or later, upon the dead Countess, who

in life had been his idol. He conceived a horror, be she what she

might, of her remains being profaned by the outrage of a posthumous

execution. He has left a curious paper to prove that the vampire,

on its expulsion from its amphibious existence, is projected into a

far more horrible life; and he resolved to save his once beloved

Mircalla from this.

"He adopted the stratagem of a journey here, a pretended removal

of her remains, and a real obliteration of her monument. When age

had stolen upon him, and from the vale of years, he looked back on

the scenes he was leaving, he considered, in a different spirit,

what he had done, and a horror took possession of him. He made the

tracings and notes which have guided me to the very spot, and drew

up a confession of the deception that he had practiced. If he had

intended any further action in this matter, death prevented him;

and the hand of a remote descendant has, too late for many,

directed the pursuit to the lair of the beast."

We talked a little more, and among other things he said was

this:

"One sign of the vampire is the power of the hand. The slender

hand of Mircalla closed like a vice of steel on the General's wrist

when he raised the hatchet to strike. But its power is not confined

to its grasp; it leaves a numbness in the limb it seizes, which is

slowly, if ever, recovered from."

The following Spring my father took me a tour through Italy. We

remained away for more than a year. It was long before the terror

of recent events subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla

returns to memory with ambiguous alternations—sometimes the

playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I

saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started,

fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room

door.

CURIOUS, IF TRUE: STRANGE TALES by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

About Gaskell:

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (née Stevenson; 29 September 1810 –

12 November 1865), often referred to simply as Mrs. Gaskell, was an

English novelist and short story writer during the Victorian era.

She is perhaps best known for her biography of Charlotte Brontë.

Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of

society, including the very poor, and as such are of interest to

social historians as well as lovers of literature.