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.