Carmilla

The sheet for Carmilla is excessive, and requires a bit of warning before reading. First, it was one of the last characters written and it was handed to Lena Collins, the sister of Ivan Collins, who was a student and artists model. It is generally assumed that Lena Collins was involved with Walker at the time (despite the offices of Dolores Cooke) and she was generally probably the one person to whom he could have handed such a sheet. She apparently shrieked gaily and chased him about the room with it, striking him blows upon the head and shoulders.

It isn't clear that anyone had ever seen the sheet, however it was printed on at least one other occasion, quite possibly because Henrietta edited it and saw no problems. Some stories say it was written on a dare from Ivan Collins.

To be appreciated, it may be well for the reader to read the actual text of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, which Walker without doubt had in front of him (along with, one would guess, some spirits and hashish) when he wrote the Carmilla sheet. Despite initial appearances, it is not a word for word copy.

It is not for the weak stomached. It is generally believed that Dora Belle Henderson walked out of the Carrolton Run after being presented with the sheet. Her brother Edward Henderson is said to have called later in the day to demand satisfaction, at which time Walker was not sufficiently conscious to answer him.

Walker was the author of several anonymous books of late Victorian pornography, which he wrote to supplement his income, and one imagines, out of perverse pleasure in the subversion of the literary art. The tone is just slightly remniscent of Roald Dahl's My Uncle Oswald, within of course the constraints of a direct parody.

Carmilla

In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or scheiss. A small income, in that part of the world, goes a great way. Eight or nine rusty farthings a year is more than most of the peasantry would get if they whored out their own mother on the street twice a day. Scantily enough ours would have answered among wealthy people at home. My father is English, and I bear an English name, although I never saw England, from which my father fled perforce after some act of perversity so exceptional as to raise even the usually blank English eyebrow. But here, in this lonely and primitive place, where you can take a torpedo boat up the back alley of the burger's daugther for two quid (such is the Germanic obsession with vehicles of destruction), I really don't see how ever so much more money would at all materially add to our comforts, or even luxuries, considering that there are only so many times per day that one might perform the balsamic injection.

My father was in the Ethiopian service where the proliferation of Nubian boys saw to it that I had no siblings, and retired upon a pension (granted only after certain letters had been proposed for publication) and his parsimony, and purchased this feudal residence, and the small estate on which it stands, a bargain, the previous inhabitants having degenerated into troll-men of some sort and made off into the hills. They were decently fast, but made a fair breakfast if one could catch them with a fowling piece about daylight, and didn't mind the stench of cleaning them.

Nothing can be more picturesque or solitary. It stands on a slight eminence in a forest...but I digress...I was describing the castle, or in the local parlance, scheiss.

The road, very old and narrow, passes in front of its drawbridge, a reminder of days when the place still had a roof, and might conceivably have been of strategic entrance to anyone that could not be driven away by a three legged and near sighted guard poodle.
The moat, was periodically stocked with perch, which as it was also the outflow for the garderobe, spent most of their time floating on its surface in white fleets among the well nourished water-lilies.

Over all this the Schiess shows its many-windowed front, having much the aspect of an aging prizefighter - what isn't knocked out isn't pretty, but it's still standing so one can't complain.
Looking from the hall door towards the road, the forest in which our castle (now that I've impressed you with my command of German, I'll call it a castle, like every other English speaking man) stands extends fifteen miles to the right, and twelve to the left. The nearest inhabited village is about seven of your English miles to the left. The nearest inhabited schloss of any historic associations, is that of old General Spielsdorf, nearly twenty miles away to the right, who is distinguished both by the speed of his haste away from the French at Sedan, and the various body parts which he left behind without recovering as they liberally salted his backside with the spray of a milltraeuse.

I have said "the nearest inhabited village," because there is, only three miles westward, that is to say in the direction of General Spielsdorf's schloss, a ruined village, with its quaint little church, now roofless (much like our home), in the aisle of which are the mouldering tombs of the proud family of Karnstein, now extinct, the chains largely broken due to their fondness for plundering the immediately past generation every time their appalling gambling debts caused burly collectors with hobnail boots to come a calling, who about ten thousand glasses of Liebfraumilch ago owned the equally desolate chateau which, in the thick of the forest, overlooks the silent ruins of the town.

Respecting the cause of the desertion of this striking and melancholy spot, there is a legend which I shall relate to you another time.

I must tell you now, how very small is the party who constitute the inhabitants of our castle. I don't include servants, lascars, chinamen, merinos, pomeranian dogs, or any of the other inferior sorts my father kept about to vent his unnatural lust, or those dependents who occupy rooms in the buildings attached to the schloss. Listen, and wonder! My father, who is the kindest man on earth (if only everyone else upon it were chill and dead), but whose mind wanders from the depradations of the ; and I, at the date of my story, only nineteen.

I and my father, a half dozen tins of dried cod, ten quarts of cheap gin and fourscore cartons of Flanigan's patented Phanerogam Rendering Tube constituted the family at the schloss. My mother, a Styrian lady, died in my probably of my father's sadistic depravations as I periodically encountered items of memory to her - her hand for example, embalmed and laid upon the table, and her bones forming a quaint candelabra in the foyer. But I had a good-natured governess, an ex nautch girl who had been with me from, I might almost say, my infancy. I could not remember the time time when her fat, benignant face was not a familiar picture in my memory, nor her eighteen stone of quivering flesh absent from my daily exertions.
But enough about the author, and let me tell you about Carmilla the Vampire...

Not of course that I knew she was a vampire at the time. She was pretty in that "I have been dead for about a century and must subsist on the blood of the living" charm, and I remembered her from my childhood, she having slipped into my nursery to put her lips to use. In our house having this or that bit of the anatomy suckled or bitten off was all part of a day, and I thought no more of it, though she forms one of my earliest sexual memories which does not involve fornication within the bounds of consanguanity or dairy animals.

She came to live with us, by a clever turn of the narrator, which I shall not recount here.

All I could learn of her was:

Her name was Carmilla.

Her family (like that of every other gypsy in the environs) was very ancient and noble and etc.

Her home lay in the direction of the west.

She would not tell me the name of her family, nor their armorial bearings, nor the name of their estate, nor even that of the country they lived in.

You are not to suppose that I worried her incessantly on these subjects. We had a new scullery maid who had not yet lost all of her teeth, and was desparate enough to try her chances with us, and my father was by now feeble enough that with a few harsh blows with the fireplace instruments I was able to keep him off her.

For Carmilla's part, she used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear, "Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die-die, sweetly die-into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit."

And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek.
I suppose I should have paid more attention, but at my age when faced with a woman who still had the dentistry God gave her (Ha! Not God as I was later to learn!!!) One had a hard time making out exact words when one's ears were plugged with a surefeit of thigh.

From these foolish embraces, which were not of very frequent occurrence, I must allow, I used to wish to extricate myself; but my energies seemed to fail me. Her murmured words sounded like a lullaby in my ear, and soothed my resistance into a trance, from which I only seemed to recover myself when she had reached the pinnacle of active delight.
In these mysterious moods I did not like her. I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust, much like when sponge bathing my father's sores.

I had no distinct thoughts about her while such scenes lasted, but I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence. Except in these brief periods of mysterious excitement her ways were girlish; and there was always a languor about her, quite incompatible with a masculine system in a state of health - in short I was frustrated..

In some respects her habits were odd. Perhaps not so singular in the opinion of a town lady like you, as they appeared to us rustic people. She used to come down very late, generally not till one o'clock, she would then take a cup of chocolate, but eat nothing; we then went out for a walk, which was a mere saunter, and she seemed, almost immediately, exhausted, and either returned to the schleiss or sat on one of the benches that were placed, here and there, among the trees. I suppose I should have guessed at something by the languid manner in which she snatched squirrels and other small rodents off of trees and snapping their heads off sucked their blood down in sharp wheezing gulps. But I gathered from these chance hints that her native country was much more remote than I had at first fancied, and imagined her to be French.

As we sat thus one afternoon under the trees a funeral passed us by. It was that of a pretty young girl, whom I had often seen, the daughter of one of the rangers of the forest. The poor man was walking behind the coffin of his darling; she was his only child, and he looked quite heartbroken.

Peasants walking two-and-two came behind, they were singing a funeral hymn.

I rose to mark my respect as they passed, and joined in the hymn they were very sweetly singing.

My companion shook me a little roughly, and I turned surprised.

She said brusquely, "Doesn't that make you hungry?"

"I think it very sweet, on the contrary," I answered, vexed at the interruption, and very uncomfortable, lest the people who composed the little procession should observe and resent what was passing.

"Well it makes me think of dinner!" said Carmilla, almost angrily. "For I live upon the flesh and blood of the living and gnaw the bones of the dead."

She sat down. Her face underwent a change that alarmed and even terrified me for a moment. It darkened, and became horribly livid; her teeth and hands were clenched, and she frowned and compressed her lips, while she stared down upon the ground at her feet, and trembled all over with a continued shudder as irrepressible as ague. All her energies seemed strained to suppress a fit, with which she was then breathlessly tugging; and at length a low convulsive cry of suffering broke from her, and gradually the hysteria subsided.

Despite her culinary irregularities I thought no more of it, though I suppose it should have occured to me that this was not an ordinary reaction to a funeral. But then neither was my father's wild capering and anxious attempts to purchase the corpse, for "at least an evening or so!" My concern passed away like a summer cloud; and never but once afterwards did I witness on her part a momentary sign of anger save when she was binding the scullery maid into the nail laced steel frame from which she was wont to drink her blood. But I will tell you how it happened.

She and I were looking out of one of the long drawing-room windows, when there entered the courtyard, over the drawbridge, a figure of a wanderer whom I knew very well. He used to visit the schloss generally twice a year.

It was the figure of a hunchback, with the sharp lean features that generally accompany deformity or German ancestry. He wore a pointed black beard, and he was smiling from ear to ear, showing his white fangs. He was dressed in buff, black, and scarlet, and crossed with more straps and belts than I could count, from which hung all manner of things. Behind, he carried a magic-lantern, and two boxes, which I well knew, in one of which was a salamander, and in the other a mandrake. These monsters used to make my father laugh in ways that would make the most debased of men take notice.

He advanced to the window with many smiles and salutations, and his hat in his left hand, his fiddle under his arm, and with a fluency that never took breath, he gabbled a long advertisement of all his accomplishments, and the resources of the various arts which he placed at our service, and the curiosities and entertainments which it was in his power, at our bidding, to display.

"Will your ladyships be pleased to buy an amulet against the oupire, which is going like the wolf, I hear, through these woods," he said dropping his hat on the pavement. "They are dying of it right and left and here is a charm that never fails; only pinned to the pillow, and you may summon the Devil whenever you wish."

These charms consisted of oblong slips of vellum, with cabalistic ciphers and diagrams upon them. I purchased one in the thoughts I might give it to my father and suggest he read it over his night-cap.

The Mountebank was looking up, and we were smiling down upon him, amused; at least, I can answer for myself. His piercing black eye, as he looked up in our faces, seemed to detect something that fixed for a moment his curiosity,

In an instant he unrolled a leather case, full of all manner of odd little steel instruments.
"See here, my lady," he said, displaying it, and addressing me, "I have many arts with these tools which I am wont to practice upon the local maidens and they are most pleased. However in your case, I profess, among other things less useful, the art of dentistry. Your noble friend, the young lady at your right, has the sharpest tooth,-long, thin, pointed, like an awl, like a needle; ha, ha! With my sharp and long sight, as I look up, I have seen it distinctly; now if it happens to hurt the young lady, and I think it must, here am I, here are my file, my punch, my nippers; I will make it round and blunt, if her ladyship pleases; no longer the tooth of a fish, but of a beautiful young lady as she is. Hey? Is the young lady displeased? Have I been too bold? Have I offended her?"

The young lady, indeed, looked very angry as she drew back from the window.

"How dares that mountebank insult us so? Where is your father? I shall demand redress from him. My father would have had the wretch tied up to the pump, and flogged with a cart-whip, and burnt to the bones with the castle brand!"

My father though like minded in his entertainments was not so energetic these days, and I had not the interest, preferring girls.

My father was out of spirits that evening. Carmilla suggested slaughtering the hunchback and drinking his blood, which I remember thinking a bit odd, but instead I walked to the village and sold myself to the innkeeper for a half jar of toxic beer.

On coming he told me that there had been another case very similar to the two fatal ones which had lately occurred. The sister of a young peasant on, only a mile away, was very ill, had been, as she described it, attacked very nearly in the same way, and was now slowly but steadily sinking.

It would be vain my attempting to tell you the horror with which, even now, I recall the occurrence of that night. It was no such transitory terror as a dream leaves behind it. It seemed to deepen by time, and communicated itself to the room and the very furniture that had encompass the apparition.

So, since vain, I'll knock off here. They don't let me have much paper in this place after all.
And now Carmilla a few tender notes of special interest to you:

1) You have since entered the service of the Beetle, a supernatural creature even more majestic and terrible than yourself. You are one of her principal evil minions. It's not bad work if you can get it, pays well enough.

2) Having had your fill of Narrator, you've recently taken to vampirizing Dr. Nikola Svengali. You've been drawn back to him again and again, though you don't seem to feel but a little less hungry. Still he's better than nothing, and a nice enough chap.