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It was dark and it would not stop. Carmilla waited with the sharp ball of terror in her stomach that had not disappeared with the years. She felt herself pressed as if between boards, an endless roaring blackness in her ears. Cold as the earth is under the surface where seasons mean nothing. It splintered. Her mind was shattered into a thousand shards with the fury that assaulted her and crying out she shot up in bed to the beginnings of dawn and Laura’s slow breathing.
“Carm?”
Laura was slow to come out of sleep and register that something had happened. She pulled herself halfway up and lay propped against the pillows with eyes unwilling to open. Carmilla tried to fix her attention on her face and her tangles of hair.
“Hey, it's all right. Just a bad dream.”
“You were screaming.”
Carmilla squeezed her shoulder, rolled out of bed and padded to the window. She twitched one curtain aside to look at the sky. The stars were still out, but the village and the hills around were starting to show up in the early light. The first blackbirds were testing the quiet.
“It's to be expected.” She flung the curtains as wide as they would go. “I haven't been back since.”
“Is it- is it too soon? Because we don't have to do this now, Carm.” Laura shuffled forward enough to take Carmilla's hand without pushing into her space. “We could come back another time.”
“No. It's never going to be easier. Better to do it today.” She turned from the window to Laura and lent down to plant a kiss on her forehead. “Or after breakfast, anyway. No hurry.” She drifted back to bed, leaving the curtains wide and the sky visible.
“You've never told me what it was like. It's okay if you can't,” Laura added hurriedly.
Carmilla folded herself into her side.“I will tell you, cupcake. But let's wait for the sun to be up first.”
There had been light. It was flame, and the light inside the head that comes from concussion. And then the endless dull roaring in her ears was replaced by new sounds: some near, some far away. All dull and muffled, but she hadn’t had different sounds to distinguish for a long time and at first she lay limp and pathetic, unable to comprehend that something had happened for the first time in decades.
There were different noises coming through the ocean of fluid she floated in. Direction had long since ceased to mean anything save for the partial, useless awareness of up and down. This did not desert her after the first disorientation of the explosion. The sounds were coming from above. She reached out and touched the coffin lid. It was three inches above her face, and she had not touched it for years. There had been no point. The lid was stone, rough on the inside at least. She had never seen the outside. The sensation of uneven rock recalled her mind to touch. She felt something at the top of her head which had not faded away after the shaking. A slight pressure. She wiped her forehead and came away with something hard and sharp: a shard of stone. Immediately she pressed her palms to the roof above her and scuttled upwards in front of her unseeing eyes. A crack. More than a crack, a breakage. She could push a finger through.
For the first time since her interment, Carmilla felt the touch of something other than blood and stone. There was air above her lid. And not stale air as of a crypt, but air with movement. The realization was seeping into her other senses also. The blood, so long dank and deoxygenated, was flowering again. Whatever means by which Maman had preserved it through decades was effective enough for her tastebuds to register the difference. After years of stale blood forcing her to keep living but no more, there was real sustaining power in the mouthfuls she gulped.
Her mind lit up and thoughts blossomed. The slow, vague dreaming of a mind on ice began to pull into focus. She had been broken out, or partially. To shatter the stone lid or move the tonnes of earth above her would have been impossible even without Maman’s spells holding her shut in, but if the earth had been cleared and the lid shattered… and it was possible too that the spells had lived in the stone.
She braced herself and pushed. The main piece of the lid was enormously heavy and pinned in place by something towards her feet, but she could lift the top half off the coffin sides by a fraction of an inch and drag it sideways. The slabs ground together and her arms so unaccustomed to effort screamed at her, but there was movement. After an age of slow grinding, one side of the rim fell silent. She had pushed the edge of the lid over the lip of the coffin. Easier now, and the next few inches opened a space above the right side of her head and shoulders.
Ecstatically she pushed her arm through and met nothing but air.
No need to walk it on her palms now, she seized the lid by its edge and pulled until it toppled over and everything above her was free. Carmilla rose out of the bath of blood and sat up.
She sucked in unaccustomed air and immediately doubled over to cough and spew out the years of blood filling her lungs and stomach. Not deadly to a vampire, but the body has its reflexes. It took her several minutes until her lungs were empty and the panic forced upon her by the drowning instinct subsided for the first time in decades.
Eventually she remembered she could open her eyes. At first the still blackness was replaced only by swirling blackness but then shades of grey began to come into focus and then deep blues and browns. She saw the remains of the coffin lid laid over her legs like a blanket and hoisted herself out to sit on the marble.
She was in a sort of pit. The walls were thick clay soil: cold, dense, full of stones. And twenty feet above there was a hole, ringed with the shattered corners of stone slabs. Further up it dissolved into grey. A ceiling? There was no sky from this angle, but there was a pale, chilly light filtering in from somewhere to the right.
The pit was steep but the soil was soft and she could push her hands into it to make her own holds. Clay clogged her nails, bloody strings of hair got in her eyes. Her legs seemed hardly to work and she struggled upwards with her arms only, pulling her dragging body out until she tipped over the rim and lay sprawling on the edge of a great rent in a stone flagged floor. Above her – yes, a ceiling, of the same grey stone, hints and edges picked out in white moonlight. A little mausoleum, perhaps only five or six paces to a side. Out of the pit now, she could see that part of the roof was broken by the same force that had buried itself in the earth and through the rent were stars. A touch of foul smoke hung in the air.
It was a linen shroud wrapped loosely around her that had stopped her legs moving. She tore it off in strips and left the blood-soaked wrapper where it lay. She crawled first, to the end of the mausoleum where a heavy wooden door was locked and bolted from the outside, and then stood hesitantly. She nearly toppled over the first try and had to cling to the cobwebbed wall. The moonlight came in through the cracks around door. A gentle wind entered too, and she tasted clean air on her filthy tongue.
The hinges broke in a few blows and she stepped out on unsteady feet to greet the new world.
The stars above were clear and strong, the great bear and the dragon curling at the height of the northern sky, and a moon nearly full lighting her way. A small churchyard, the older graves crooked and the grass uncut, but there were newer headstones too and the place did not look abandoned so much as imperfectly cared for. She stumbled on still shambling feet between the mounds without flowers and the dirt path leading to the church. Nobody came to discover the damage to her mausoleum save a moth that fluttered across the face of the moon. She watched it in amazement as it landed on the door and waved its feelers at the night air.
The church was empty and looked as if it had been without a clean for some weeks. The door hinges threatened to summon any listeners to discover her. Dust on the pews, not deep but enough that she could leave trailing fingermarks. Her footsteps behind her were outlined in a mixture of mud and blood; the filth was drying on her skin in the mild air.
She found a tap out back next to a storeroom and filled a tin bucket with stale cistern water, tasting of too long waiting in a lead tank. Two dousings took off the worst of the mess and a one more to soak the remainder out of her hair. She swilled her mouth out but nothing got rid of the taste of decades-old blood. Nobody came to disturb her washing and she could see no lights from a vicarage or nearby house so she went back inside. She found the robes hanging in the vestry cut mostly for paunchy men a foot taller than her, but there was something white on a back shelf that at least she didn't trip over when walking.
In the circumstances she preferred the open air. She climbed the creaking stairs to the top of the little tower and came out on a roof edged with a low wall. Above her the stars again and she lay down on her back and watched them turn until she slept properly at long last.
Laura's hand on hers trembled. The waiter brought more coffee for Carmilla and something more froth than coffee for Laura. He cleared the empty cups and nodded to her muttered danke.
She felt Laura sift through the questions before she opened her mouth. “What did you think about?”
“You know, nothing at first. I couldn't.” She broke a wafer into layers and dipped one into her cup before tasting it. “It was, it was like those times you're ill but you have to get out of bed to get a drink or something. Everything was so difficult there was no room for thought. Just: climb, walk, open door. Not much else. Sleep.”
“So you didn't.” She paused. “Ell?”
“I'd had seventy years, cupcake. It didn't hurt any less, but.” She shrugged. “After a while grief isn't a feeling any more. It's just numbness. It freezes your heart.”
Around them the market was setting up. It was not a large village, but there were people enough for the occasion and it looked like visitors came in from some distance around. There were even a dozen young walkers sitting in the square on big rucksacks, teasing each other and patiently eyeing a man preparing to sell bacon rolls.
“Does it look the same?” Laura asked. “This place?”
Carmilla tried to see the physical village under all the people. “This bit, I guess. The old bit around the crossroads.” She waved vaguely over her shoulder. “But there's a lot of new stuff around where the hotel is. It was much smaller back then. And emptier.”
“Do you-” She pulled a lock of hair back and forth before finishing the question. “How do you know the tomb is still there? If it was hit?”
“Mother owned it. She bought it off the church and there were instructions that they must never disturb it, never even touch it. I was to be imprisoned forever. But it's not the tomb I came to see.”
She awoke at the first beginnings of dawn. The light, dim though it was, blinded her unaccustomed eyes. She lay with them tightly shut as the prickling of early sunlight spread across her. There were birds singing around her, the air cool and damp at first but with warmth seeping in to the stone under her back. Her eyes opened and she beheld the pale smudged blue of morning.
From the tower she scanned the land. It looked out over a wide swathe of hill country, some time in late spring. The grass was thick and lush, the smell of it rising out of the meadows and mingling with the resin of the woods. Still feeling her way in this new world, she took a while to realise that something might not be right. She had heard birds, and the wind in the trees, and her returning vampire senses detected the rustlings in undergrowth of something small by the graveyard edge. A squirrel, maybe. But she couldn’t hear any people. The church stood a little way apart from the village, which might account for some of the hush, but there should be something audible. She crept downstairs.
The village was down a wide dirt road, grass growing in the middle where cartwheels left it unmolested. There were no recent footprints and she heard no voices or movement as she came out into the square. It was a small place, a few dozen houses clustered on a saddle of land between two hills and two valleys. The road wound down from the hill that held the church and forked off left and right to the meadows that filled the valleys. A rough stone cross marked the nominal centre. Nobody. The houses were quiet and still, the whole place apparently abandoned. She didn't even hear any animals, no chickens, no horses, no cows lowing to each other.
“Who goes there?” The voice startled her and she froze in her footsteps. Panic clenched in her stomach. For an instant she had no idea whether to attack or flee or anything else. There was a shuffling motion behind her and the man asked again as she turned. “Who’s that? Young lady?”
He was old, grey haired and weary looking, and although his clothes looked good they were not in good repair. He limped slightly as he came forward from an alleyway and she saw how his feet could not lift far from the ground. One of them dragged, turned out sideways, and he had to lean his weight on a stick.
Her claws came out instinctively. Kill him. That was obvious. Then she’d have herself a good meal and the village all to herself. But more pressing than the predatory urge was a need for information. The village was deserted: why? What was the danger?
She tried to say hello but could not form the word. Too long without speech. He heard her choke, though, and took on an expression of concern. “Are you hurt?” he asked, peering forward and Carmilla realized he couldn’t see her properly.
“I’m all right,” she managed to say, and clutched her hands behind her back, willing the nails back into their beds. “Who are you? Where is everyone?”
“Where indeed?” He shook his head. “By now I cannot guess. They fled of course, like all sensible people. All sensible people who don’t have one of these, anyway,” and he slapped his game leg. “My retreating days are over, hmm? You’ve been running west too, I suppose.”
She let him suppose whatever was most plausible. “Something smashed into the churchyard last night.”
“Ah yes, I heard it. So that’s where it hit.” He nodded abstractedly.
“Do you know what it was?”
“There was an aeroplane above just before. I don’t know whether one of ours or one of theirs. If that distinction means anything any more,” he added, and there was an edge to his voice when he said it.
Carmilla didn’t understand the word ‘aeroplane’, but nodded and focused on the important questions. There was apparently a war on. “Is that happening a lot?”
“No, no. We’re not a major target. But in the night, and from far above, I suppose everything looks more or less the same. I have relocated my bed to the cellar just in case.”
She was certainly out of her depth here. From far above? Part of her wanted to run and find somewhere to hide, but the deserted village and unaccountable destruction meant that running without understanding was a bad move. She tried to think of more questions.
“Will it all be all right? The war?” That seemed a safe enough assumption. Naïve, scared girl. One to be explained to.
But the old man just shrugged. “And who knows what all right means, these days? Not me. Ah, manners! I am Herr Bauer – Josef, actually. In the circumstances.”
“Carmilla.” Or Mircalla. Arcillma. Millarca. But Carmilla was the name she had worn going into the coffin and the one Ell had used, so that would do. He took her hand – she flinched – and he did a half-bow that suggested he would have been in the hand-kissing business were he younger and the occasion happier.
“How do you do. Are you hungry? I have food.” He gestured to one of the houses. “Whatever the others couldn't carry away stayed here.”
The house apparently was Josef's own. Small, but comfortable and in good repair. Solid furniture, a piano with a row of framed photographs along the top. He busied himself in the kitchen and she picked one up: a young man in a fine suit with a flower in his buttonhole, standing proudly beside a grand piano in a great hall with organ pipes in the background. She frowned, trying to dredge up a memory. She had seen that orchestra stage before – and recently. Or not recently, but not long before the coffin. The inauguration of the-
“Wiener Musikverein,” she whispered. She had been there when it opened. 1870. Johann Strauss had conducted the ball. She felt it all there, under the surface, the memories she had been too fogged to relive for so long. She had worn... blue, yes, a deep blue like the sky at dusk. Her mother was in black, Matska in burgundy. The Empress had been there – her long dark curls that Carmilla's fingers twitched to run through. The Emperor in his sparkling medals. The dowdy woman Clara who came suddenly, thrillingly alive at the piano. She could feel their faces and almost spoke their names aloud. But-
“Ah, you know music? Yes, that old place. A long time ago now.” Josef emerged from the kitchen with a plate of food. He tapped the glass of the photograph in Carmilla's hands familiarly. “Not that I ever played the big events. But the little ones, I am proud to say yes.” He took the picture from her and put it back in its place.
“When did you-?”
“Oh, forty, fifty years back.” He ushered her to a chair. The food was imperishable iron rations: rye bread and dried sausage, some hoarded vegetables in a rough preserve. She didn't need it but ate for the novelty. It tasted like nothing she could remember.
Forty of fifty years back. So what did that make this year? 1910 or 1920 at the earliest, but it could be much later.
He watched her break the bread, saying nothing. That was fine with her but when she had eaten her meal there was the awkward silence of two strangers with nothing between them and nowhere to go.
Her eyes crept back to the piano. “May I?” she asked eventually.
“Please. Little good to me now.” He held up his own hands for her inspection, the fingers gnarled and bent.
She lifted the dark wood lid and touched the keys. Good ivory, a little yellowed but still in perfect shape. She tried to summon up the memory of music. It had been so hard in the coffin when the very experience of sound had been denied to her. An image filtered back, two right hands interlocking on the keys and brushing each other between pieces.
She could not begin. Her hands hovered over the first bar of the Prelude but could not grasp it.
“I'm sorry.” The tears were coming, as they had not for decades. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.” Josef struggled to his feet and hesitantly took her hand as it clenched over the wound of what was not there. “I can't. They won't do it. I used to, with her. She-” but the rest of the sentence choked her throat. “She-”
“Ah,” he said heavily. “Carmilla, who?”
She did not mean to begin her story at all, let alone like this, but first words burst out. “My mother! She-”
“My dear girl.”
She wanted to tell him that he was mistaken, that it wasn't her mother who was dead, that she had done something else and that her tears were for another, but the words abandoned her just as the notes had.
Laura sat with her on the steps of the cross pillar in the centre of the village. To their left and right, people moved between market stalls. Occasional cars forded their way through the streams of people.
“How did you feel about your mother?” Laura wanted to know.
Carmilla stared at the ground. “I... hated her, obviously. And – no, I didn't hate her. Or I did.” She tried to gather the thoughts in. “I knew the girl who went into the coffin both hated her for what she did to Ell and loved her for her own reasons. And I supposed that was me. Hate, but I couldn't disown her still being as I was. I mean, I wanted to hate her but I couldn't because then I'd be hating myself.” She played with a discarded leaf, shredding it to the bone.
“That sounds like the kind of thing she would have told you to think.”
“Yeah. Yeah, it does.” Carmilla drew a breath. “She gave me birth from the grave. It took me a long while to realise I'd done it again. Anyway,” she added, bringing the subject back to the facts, “it was just me and the old man left in the village.”
“And what about everyone else? Where had they gone?”
“West,” Carmilla said. “There were Russian troops down in the valley, moving north-west. So people got out of their way.”
“What about the Nazis?”
She shrugged and tapped her knuckles on the stone beside her. “Not many left by that point. I didn't know anything about it at the time of course, but the war was almost over, everyone in retreat, every soldier sent to Prague or Berlin or Bavaria. All save the rearguards.”
It was night, but it still felt bright. Carmilla had taken her pick of the remaining houses in the village and gone to lie down in a four-poster bed formerly belonging to one of the richer citizens until it seemed likely to her that the old man would be asleep. She left by the servant's door at the back, unseen, wearing something more robust than the gown she'd taken from the church. The air was cold, not yet the balmy summers that would come.
She climbed the church tower again and perched on the wall. The country around was dark, but from this vantage point and given the time to wait and watch, she began to take in her surroundings. Alpine hill country had never been the most navigable by night. Sparse dwellings, and those who lived there stayed in at night and did not waste light. But down the slope of the hill and perhaps two miles away along the valley, there was something lighting up. Maybe a fire? She closed her eyes and focused on her ears. Wind creaking the trees, an owl, bats coming out of their roost back on the other side of the village. Thunder in the distant north-east, far off, incessant. She checked the sky – the stars were spreading from horizon to horizon. Granted there were hills and mountains getting in the way, but nowhere for thunder to live. Cannon, then? At night?
She climbed down and shifted. A panther slipped out of the churchyard and down the meadow slopes into the valley below. Around her the wide-eyed animals found a new menace in the night but she ignored them. She ate up miles.
A small river ran through the valley, fast and cold with the spring rains from up in the mountains. A rough road followed it, crossing and recrossing each bend by a dozen little bridges. She tracked a stink of foul oil and found the spark of light seen from the tower. As she drew close, it resolved itself clearly into fires. A wood straggled the left bank of this reach of the river and in the middle of it were several piles of burning brush and the hunched shapes of tired men. She sank into the undergrowth and insinuated herself into the depths of the wood.
The voices were not speaking German. It took her a while to dredge up the other languages, the ones learned after childhood that did not return so quickly: Russian. So these were the soldiers.
The undergrowth of brambles and wild garlic waved to either side as she padded on silent feet and clung to the shadows of the trees. There were sentries posted around the lit up portion of the wood, standing just outside the circle of warmth and light. She came to within twenty yards of one and he did not see her black shape amongst the other black shapes of the night. He stared out, now and again looking sharply to one side as a twig cracking signified either an animal on the move or some other false alarm.
“Hey, Andrei! You're looking jumpy.” A voice from the men around the fire. Annoyance, mixed with a certain care. “Something you should be telling the rest of us?”
“Sorry, Sergeant. Though I saw something.”
Twigs cracked and a large man lumbered up. “And what do we do when we see things? We raise the alarm, Andrei. Show me.”
Carmilla crouched further down. Stupid to let curiosity get the better of her. In front of her the two soldiers looked out into the darkness. Andrei was a small man, not much more than a boy. He smelt of what soldiers had always smelt of, dirt and smoke and unwashed clothes.
“Fox?” offered Andrei, gesturing at the now silent wood with nothing to show. The sergeant grunted, clapped him on the shoulder and turned back.
Gunfire broke through the night, faster than Carmilla had ever heard it. There was shouting, screams, orders being yelled. The attackers were coming parallel to the river, and the Russians hurried to the opposite side of the firelight to throw themselves down under cover and find logs to hide behind as they tried to fire back. Explosions, shattering light of grenades and magnesium flares, and the boy in front of her collapsed choking up his lungs. The big sergeant bellowed defiance, shouted at his men to go forward and all at once the world rocked. Stamping boots, running feet. She crouched as low in the undergrowth as she could, unwilling to risk being a moving shape in the action, until the soldiers had moved out of the light and taken the battle to the edge of the woods.
Carmilla smelled the blood, fresh and unlike the stale stuff that had clogged her since her interment. She crept out of the brambles into the clearing, senses alert listening for any sound of returning boots. It all came from some way off, a Russian voice shouting one half of a conversation, demanding help and support but from whom she couldn't hear. Further off still the gunfire was resuming, more measured. The soldiers were regrouping.
The dying boy – the dying soldier – was breathing unsteadily. A spasm took him and he arched his back. She came forward, flowing back to woman shape again, and knelt over his unfocused eyes. She touched the wound in his side and came away with bloody hands. A name escaped his lips. Her fingernails dug into the sweaty skin of his unshaven neck, but his expression widened and his shaking hand found her, dragged it to his breast pocket. The sounds from his mouth were not words, only the splintered ends of things unsaid. She nodded uncomprehending, and closed his eyes, and bent down.
When she came away with his throat in her mouth there was a smile on his frozen lips. She drank again and tugged her hand on his chest out of his dead fingers. The pocket he had pressed her against contained a piece of creased cardboard, a cheap printed icon of a dark-eyed Russian Christ standing on broken coffins, and she tucked it back inside despite the blood her hands had coated it in.
“Did you feed a lot?”
Carmilla shrugged. “I guess. Not right then, there weren't a lot of people around my tomb. But later, when I had left the village.”
“Who?” Laura demanded.
“Cupcake, don't ask. You know I wasn't... you know I wasn't the person you met back then. Not quite.” She threw her hands up. “Soldiers. Refugees. Prisoners of war. If it makes you feel better I didn't play games with them like I used to, in the days before the coffin.” She risked a grin. “Strictly predatory.”
“Right.” Laura bit her lip and scuffed the road. Carmilla caught in her arms and squeezed. “Oh, all right! I'm not expecting heroic vampire crap from your past self, Mademoiselle Terror of the Nazis and their Necks.”
They resumed their dawdling path, out of the market square and onto a side road of worn cobbles. It bent around sharply, and they had to wait for several minutes for a car to carefully manoeuvre the way out around a particularly sharp part. After the turn was a building with doors open: clean brick, wide glass windows, balconies for flats above a thriving general store.
“This is...” Carmilla hung back, twisting her hands. “I didn't expect this. It's gone. They knocked it down. I was going to- oh God, but nobody remembers. Nobody remembers it any more.”
She sagged against the wall and Laura put an arm around her waist to hold her.
“You'd have thought I'd have gotten used to things disappearing by now.”
She was sitting at the kitchen table opposite Josef, watching him carefully decant paraffin oil from a dozen scavenged lamps into one single bottle for safe keeping. She chanced a question. “There was fighting last night.” He nodded agreement and she understood with relief that the battle had been audible up here too.
“You should go,” he said after a while. “Follow the others west. This is not a bad place to wait, but it is not a place to hide.”
“To wait?”
“For the end. One way or another.”
It took her some moments to understand. “You're waiting to die?”
“As I said.” His methodical work did not pause. “One way or another.”
“Why?”
“Why? I am seventy-one and half crippled with no more than two weeks of food and there are soldiers coming. What else should I do?”
“You're just going to give up?”
He laughed softly. “There's no way that we can win. And there are some things more important than being able to win. The country is dying, so I might as well go with it. Although I do hope the Russians leave me in peace when they come.”
“Maybe there are more Austrian soldiers. To come for us.”
There was something in his face now that she did not like and his hands pouring the oil shook almost imperceptibly. “There are no Austrian soldiers any more.”
“Oh, but-” she felt the thin ice of her dislocation in time. “You know. From our land.”
He took a long time and measured his words. “You are what, nineteen? Hmm. Twelve years old when Anschluss happened. Tell me you were old enough even then not to believe what you were taught at school?”
Anschluss – “union”. That boded poorly. She racked her brains to find an appropriate answer. “Of course not. I remember... before.”
He seemed relieved. “Good. Some of the ones too young to know better... Linzermann's boy, he swallowed it whole. Ach.” The mist passed from his eyes. “No, Carmilla. There is no way to fight and nothing to fight for. Sometimes that's just the way of the world and we must learn to bear it as best we can.”
“We must accept defeat?”
“We must embrace it!” He slapped his palm on the table and she jumped. “It is the only thing that can save us. We must meet our match. So that we can die and the new Austria, the new Germany will be different. Yes, I want us to be defeated. I want us dead and buried and trampled underfoot. So we can be new again.”
The words rattled in her bones. “Why?”
“We have become monsters. You don't know, do you? For you it's just rumour, how we have glutted ourselves on Europe's blood.” He was breathing hard now but did not slow down. “The Truckel boy, he came home on leave and got drunk for a week. He told me. He was in Poland. They marched his regiment past one of... the camps. That's what he called them. The camps.
“War is all they're good for, the madmen in Berlin, and war is a sword that consumes those who wield it. To take and torture and steal and drink the world like blood. They are vampires, Carmilla. They deserve death and we deserve it for letting them.” She trembled before his anger and he softened. “Ah, do not take fright. It is the anger of the old, to rage at the failure of our world and to see no way out. For you, it will be over before you are twenty and then a new world. But do try to be as far west as you can when that happens.”
She let him subside and thought about Mother and Mattie. She thought about two centuries of slaughter and games in the courts of Europe and overseas. But it wasn't like she hadn't heard impassioned moral pleases before from idiots with mayfly ideas of right and wrong. Still, Ell had-
“You said you are seventy-one?” she asked him after a few minutes of indecision. “Where were you born? When?”
“Seventy-one. I was born in Graz in 1874.” He mistook her expression. “An age for you, hmm?”
So the year was 1945 and she had been in the coffin for seventy-three years. Carmilla didn’t know if she had expected it to be more or less.
Josef smiled. “But you don’t remember the old empire, do you? All gone now. Like my beautiful Empress before it.”
Carmilla remembered when it was the new empire, but she shook her head and smiled at him to continue.
“So strange. It was so short when I look back now, but then it seemed it would last forever. Hindsight makes it romantic, you know. Vienna at the turn of the century. There was probably rather more counting the pennies and making do than I pretend, but in my memory it is all... dancing in mirrored halls. The birth of a new world, science and philosophy and revolution. Every night was a grand ball, a feast. A world away now, like Eden. ”
“Do you remember what happened?” That was treading a little close to the edge of revealing her ignorance, but he was settling into reminiscence.
“The first war, you mean? Of course! I was, hmm, no more than forty. Just a bit too old for the front line, but I wanted to go. Maria begged me not to, of course. But I said it would be fine, it was just depot work and I wanted to do my bit even in the rear. Ha!”
“What happened?”
“When the line against Russia collapsed, the rear of the army became the front very quickly. It was chaos, the retreat from Galicia. So I saw some action after all.”
“Did you kill anyone?” It was out of her mouth before she could stop herself.
“Yes.” He concentrated on the bottle and did not look at her. “I don't know how many in Galicia. Probably not many, we just fired without looking, but there must have been some. And then later... I was a better shot by then, God forgive me.”
Carmilla remembered gold locks and blue eyes. There was guilt there. She tried to remember other faces and find guilt to match them up with, but her heart drew a blank. For the first time in as long as she could remember, that felt wrong.
“Did you feel guilty?”
“What a question.” He sighed. “I am thankful that I still am, every day. Pass me the bottle of meths, this one's clogged.” He dabbed the spirit on a nozzle bunged up with paraffin jelly until he could pour out the last dregs.
“There was a battle in Italy,” he said, and his voice was quiet, reciting the words like poetry. Carmilla had the impression that he wasn't talking directly to her. “This was later on, when the army was running out of men and everyone was at the front. I was in the rear watch of my company, and a pair of Italian scouts found me. They were more scared of me than I of them, so I shot them one after the other. The first died quickly, but the second rolled into a ditch and started crying.”
Carmilla remembered the crying. The girls had done it a lot, towards the end. The ones she and Mattie cut cards for. Even the ones who got the high card cried when they saw their friends die. Mattie shooed them away so her little sister wouldn't be put off her dinner.
“He was calling for help and I heard an answer from further down. I should have run. But I pulled him out of the ditch and used his belt as a tourniquet for his leg. And then I ran like hell for my own lines.” He had given up even the pretence of working now. “And the oddest thing is, I don't think I would have helped him if I hadn't killed his friend first. Somehow that was one too many. A priest told me later that consciences always have to grow too late – they follow behind guilt and we cannot have them without having sinned first.”
Ell had had tears in her eyes, accusing tears.
“Do you think it was enough?”
Josef put down the bottle and looked at her, slow and without expression. She realised it had sounded to him like a challenge or a demand and she coloured.
“No,” he said, after a while. “No, but I think if you save one, then it's a start.”
Don't eat him, he's a poet.
Or her, she has such a beautiful voice.
Or this one, she's just too pretty to ruin.
Josef chewed at his lip. “And a start is so much bigger than you'd think. Or so I hope.”
Laura sat on the bed and checked her watch and phone every two minutes. Carmilla had gone off after the discovery that the old man's house had been destroyed. She had said she would be back for dinner, but the light was beginning to turn yellow.
It wasn't unusual for Carmilla to go off for a day or so, but it was frightening. Laura could always see it coming before it happened. She withdrew, the part of her that was the new, living Carmilla seeming to vanish from her sight and leave an empty garment behind. It would only happen once every few months, and she usually said when she was going to go, and she always came back. Laura understood. Her girlfriend had a lot of past lives to hold together psychically. But they hadn't been to this village before.
The sun was going down when she reached the peak of worrying. She tried Carmilla's phone, found it to be turned off, sent a message and put on her shoes. Carmilla had come here to look at the house, she said. No house, so where would she go instead without Laura?
The tomb, of course.
It was later the next day when she came up out of the wood to the low meadow and clung to the hedges. The church was on her left, up above, and the village on the right of the saddle. It was too light to be safely out on a slope and the soldiers couldn’t be far behind, but that was the point. Behind her was the wood in the valley and the site of the earlier skirmish. There had been carriages on the road, like locomotives but not on rails, and tents, and on the green bank a huge but almost elegant cannon. Dozens of soldiers, some of them marching down the road to the north-west, others setting up a camp.
It would not be easy to take the old man. She could carry him easily enough, but that would reveal herself for what she was, so instead she would walk and support him and use her less obtrusive skills. Hearing and smell would help them evade the war, and she could go scavenging at night for food when he slept. They could make Switzerland that way, or at least the high mountains in the west that would be less disturbed.
She was hampered by the seventy years in the earth. Would Trieste be better? Find a ship as quickly as possible? It was so hard to know how the world worked now. But the Russians were obviously be coming from the east and south, so west made sense initially and she could hide in mountains indefinitely if need be. And then there was Mother to consider. Where would she be? Perhaps she should seek out Mattie in Morocco and discover the lie of the land.
But that was later. First was getting Josef out of the village. She needed her source of information (why this one? asked one voice in her head and she crushed it), and a grateful, lamed old man seemed the least threatening option.
If you save just one, that’s a start, her memory prompted, but she shut it down. She wasn’t starting anything. Just trying to guard her resources. After all, nothing turns out better than expected, so there was no reason to get sentimental. She could always dump him if he became inconvenient. Granted, he was quite inconvenient now, but that was different-
The gunshot cracked the air and she flung herself under a squatting elm. It was up ahead, in the village. Men’s voices, banging at doors. Shouts. She rippled, shrank, became panther and crept upwards in the shadow of the hedge,
There were at least three Russian soldiers. They shouted to each other – no alarm, but lots of reporting. They searched the village. A growling sound, one of those locomotives. She couldn’t quite make out all the words, but lots of ‘Anything?” and “Here”.
A sudden cry of alarm. Someone was shouting orders. Running boots. More shouting, and then gunfire. Three shots, and then silence. The voices resumed after a minute, finishing their search and then the growling of the engine got louder. The village descended into quiet.
Carmilla returned to her normal form and went slowly. The village was empty when she snuck out on to the road and the birds were singing again without alarm. The doors of the houses were open and there were things on the road that the looting soldiers had dropped. Stray bits of cloth, a spilling bag of rotten flour that had only looked edible in the dark of the bakery. She sniffed the touch of oil in the air.
She stopped outside Josef’s house. The door was open there too. Inside the cupboards of the kitchen were ransacked but they had been nearly empty anyway. The cellar door was wide and she smelled the blood. Everything was silent and nothing in the house was breathing.
She did not go downstairs.
If there was food not discovered by the soldiers, she did not need or want it. She went to the other houses one at a time and selected a few clothes, a knife, some bits of abandoned jewellery that could be traded. There was a threadbare pack at the bakery and she stuffed it full.
Anyway, she was unencumbered now. So that was good. Having an informant along hadn’t been a bad idea, but it would probably have gone sour before long. You couldn’t rely on people anyway. So that was no loss. And he was very old and would have died soon. So it didn't matter. And of course- but she stopped herself. She didn’t need to come up with more reasons not to care, she wasn’t trying to persuade herself of anything.
Everyone would die soon, compared to her. Even the soldiers who had killed him. Ell would have died by now too even if she’d managed to save her from Maman’s plans. So really it worked out much the same in the end, the only difference being her own freedom.
The church tower was gleaming in the afternoon sun but she turned from it and put her face towards the west.
Laura hurried down the street, dodging past the last stragglers as the market was cleared up.
The churchyard was neat and tidy in the sun. The grass mown, fresh flowers on one of the newer graves. The church itself had one door open and there was quiet and soft light inside. She saw the mausoleum at once. There was no mistaking it: a small but heavy stone structure, stark and bare without any ornament beyond the shape of the building. Half of the roof was broken off and filled with a wild lilac bush exploding from inside. The flimsy rotten wooden door was propped against the frame rather than hung on the hinges.
“Carm?” she asked. She pressed her palm to the door, hoping that there would be an answering hand on the other side, but there was no reply. She looked around to check she was alone, and shifting the wood out of the way, went in past the dismantled door.
Dust and linen on the floor. The pit covering half the inside was gaping, but rain and the seeping of time had softened the sides and filled in the bottom. Moss and plants filled the basin with nothing at the bottom.
“Who are you looking for?”
Laura turned round and squinted in the setting sun. There was a man leaning on a nearby gravestone, sleeves rolled up over brown arms. Supposing him to be the gardener, she waved at the empty hole.
“My girlfriend. She’s gone and I don’t know where she is.” She hoped he wouldn't ask her why she thought to look in a mausoleum.
“Why do you seek the living among the dead?” he asked, light and ironic.
She turned back the tomb in frustration, but his question sunk in and she realized where Carmilla would be. He had ducked out of sight when she came out, but she was already on her way into the church. The place was cool inside, opening wide in the colourful light thrown through the windows. Somebody moved around a stand of candles. She walked quickly, trying to look like she was used to being there and personally permitted to open the door to the vestry and find the stairs leading to the tower.
Carmilla lay on the floor with her face turned upwards and eyes open. She was spread out as wide as possible, her hands and bare feet soaking up the last warmth from the stone slabs as the day faded.
Laura sat next to her. She stroked Carmilla's hands, and her waist, and her cheek. Carmilla sat up.
“It was hard to go there and see the place empty,” she said, and Laura did not ask whether she meant the house without a living man in, or the street without the house, or something else entirely.
“But then I thought,” Carmilla continued, “that it would be worse if it had not been empty. Because then it would still be the same death and nothing healed.” She looked into Laura's eyes properly for the first time. “And all the things left behind are still there, just put to one side by themselves. Gone because resurrected. Do you understand?”
Laura nodded, and took her hand, and together they watched the stars come out one by one over the peaceful earth and love's risen body.