ren’s Reviews > Carmilla > Status Update

"The interpretation did not sit well with me. I fancied--perhaps luckily for my nerves--the arrangement was prescribed simply to secure a companion who would prevent my taking too much exercise or eating unripe fruit or doing any of the fifty foolish things to which young people are supposed to be prone."

"'Will you forgive me, my dear, if I risk a conjecture and ask a question?'
'Who can have a better right?' she said. 'Ask what you please, and I will tell you everything. But my story is simply one of bewilderment and darkness. I know absolutely nothing. Put any questions you please.'"

"I ran to her in an ecstasy of joy; I kissed and embraced her again and again. I ran to the bell and rang it vehemently, to bring others to the spot that they might relieve my father's anxiety.
'Dear Carmilla, what has become of you all this time? We have been in agonies of anxiety about you,' I exclaimed. 'Where have you been? How did you come back?'
'Last night has been a night of wonders,' she said."

"Half a century before, a serving girl followed the sound of a baby crying into one of those passages, the entrance of which was hidden behind a particularly gruesome tapestry of Leda and the Swan. It is said that when her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw a figure crouched against the stone wall. The serving girl was found by her screams."

"Had I been capable of comprehending my condition, I would have invoked aid and advice on my knees. The narcotic of an unsuspected influence was acting upon me, and my perceptions were be numbered."

"Sometimes there came a sensation as if a hand was drawn softly along my cheek and neck. Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, longer and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, and there the caress fixed itself. My heart beat faster, my breathing rose and fell rapidly; then came a sobbing that rose into a sense of strangulation and turned into a dreadful convulsion, in which my senses let me."

"Carmilla became more devoted to me than ever, and her strange paroxysms of languid adoration more frequent. She dotted on me with increasing ardor the more my strength and spirits waned. It shocked me, like a momentary glare of insanity."

"The two broad eyes approached my face, and suddenly I felt a stinging pain as if two large needles darted, an inch or two apart, deep into my breast.
I woke with a scream. The room was lighted by the candle that burnt there all through the night, and I saw a female figure standing at the foot of the bed. There was not the slightest stir of respiration; a block of stone could not have been more still."

"I saw that it was a sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous cat. It appeared to me about four or five feet long--it measured fully the length of the hearth-rug as it passed over it--and continued toing and froing with the lithe, sinister restlessness of a beast in a cage. I could not cry out, although I was terrified. It became so dark that I could no longer see anything of it but its eyes."

tAILYPO!

"But that night, dreams came through stone walls, and lit up dark rooms and darkened light ones... That night, I had a dream that was the beginning of a very strange agony.
I cannot call it a nightmare, for I was quite conscious of being asleep. But I was equally conscious of being in my room and lying in bed, precisely as I actually was."