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Laura walked the gray halls of her great-uncle's English estate, her white hair catching the light where the windows allowed the sun to penetrate the shadows. She had had a letter that morning that the never-met daughter of her late cousin had just died young – some defect of the heart. She hadn't the good health to travel, but she'd put on mourning all the same. There was reason to grieve any death, she'd thought to herself, and all the more reason to grieve the death of a family.
Mary, incurious and clumsy, hadn't the presence of mind to question her decision, being all too content to never inquire about her mistress' eccentricities. Laura had felt, nevertheless, a desire to explain – to describe the sentiment that drove her to such outward signs of reflection. The freckled maid had nodded as she'd spoken, trying her utmost to give the semblance of understanding. “That poor child was my last relation.” Her own voice had quavered. “Our name will die now, I suppose, with me.” She knew that Mary wanted very much to sympathize, and that was close enough to sympathy, so she thanked her after she was dressed and bade her take the day off.
With nothing else other than her sable dress to mark the occasion, she made her daily circuit of the big house once again, lost in meditations on the past and on the winding corridors of a half-forgotten castle. It was her custom now to walk in the mornings, for exercise and for reflection. She had become, in recent years, weary of reading, for some perversity within her always drew her hand to the same volume – that well-worn Calmet which seemed to dominate the library from its perch on the top shelf. Other entertainments all too often required friends she did not have or gaiety that she could not muster, and so she'd turned long ago to the simple practice of walking. The halls within the once strange home and the paths without it suited her, and she could always, upon closing her eyes, imagine that she heard more than the echoes of her footfalls.
It was a little after the hour of ten when her march took her outside, and she passed into the overgrown and under-tended garden that lay on the south side of the property. Anything that was not perennial had long ago withered away, leaving thorny clusters of raspberries and roses to choke out what other flora they could. She was not surprised when her crepe dress caught here and there as she squeezed through the thin opening between the walls, but there was a pang that ran through her when the thin skin of one of her hands cracked and bled when she tried to disentangle herself. She closed her eyes as she covered the pinprick wound, trying as best she could to form the impressions of a face unknown – to draw her sad thoughts to the poor soul who now deserved them, some poor woman lying pale and still on a bed or bier. She cut herself off after a few moments – looked up and caught her breath as she made her way to the mossy stone seat that lay in the center of the circle. Upon loosening her grip on it, she found that the wound had stopped, and with a wilting fox-grape leaf, she wiped the blood from her hands.
It was still September, and the cicadas and crickets sang their swan songs in the bushes. Laura thought for an instant that she ought pray, but found nothing to say as she folded her hands. There were too many memories today already – too much to do with death and blood and bloodlines. She didn't want to lose herself in old thoughts – to have that imagined face take on unwelcome features as her mouth traced the contours of an unspeakable name. But what was to be done? Such things never seemed far from her, not far enough in any event. To think on them was to invite them in, and once settled, they were loath to leave her: the chill of autumn, the shadows of the black coach, those languid hours when a young maiden caught herself in the glass, wondering at the pallid face staring back at her. These moments massed and arrayed themselves against her, dragging her back to the hazy kingdom of youth. What will had an old woman to resist.
As if to punctuate her growing reverie, she saw a sluggish butterfly land atop a weedy gathering of fennel, and watched as it clumsily searched for nectar to suck. A caterpillar grown too old for the world. The pagans did well when they named the soul psyche. Laura's mind floated back, remembering the waxy manuscripts that lined the shelves of the good doctor's library. Out in Oltenia they believed that the strigoaie could reincarnate as moths and butterflies, returning to those they plagued until they were burnt or pinned to a tree with a silver nail.
The dumb creature fled when she reached for it, and Laura, in spite of herself, began to cry quite without meaning to, sobbing like a child who has just lost some precious bauble. She retired early and without taking dinner.
That night was much like the day, as far as thoughts were concerned, save that the darkness seemed to offer more space for them to roam. The house exhaled a scent of impending autumn, and the open window let Laura feel the first hint of the coming coldness. There was a slim comfort in that, for the chill drew her thoughts ever so slightly from the long distant summers she longed to forget. Still, in the black of the night, those hazy days in Styria drifted nevertheless back toward her, bringing with them recollections of secret games and secret conversations, of days spent in that bright private bubble of a fairy tale wilderness. She tried not to think, tried not to imagine, and tried above all not to name the passing object of her fancies, but she was a fading woman from a fading family, and sleep did not come for her without dreams.
Only there, only in dreams did she come for her, shadowless and almost silent as her shape tread on the dust covered floor. Laura became young again, and all at once the gray sepulcher of an English country house gave way to the echoing spirals of a castle whose hallways forever smelled of pine and cedar. Only here, only now, did she dare speak that word, disassembled and reassembled as though it were a name made just for the two of them, both now, in their way, the last of the Karnsteins.
She called that name out. She invited that name in. Her dream followed its course, a story set to frighten and amuse little girls, young maidens, and aged virgins all the same, as that black and cunning shape leapt onto the counterpane and covered her body with its own. The world receded into summer as she felt her, her limbs entangled with her own, her lips kissing her breasts, her scented hair tickling her face. Her body burned with shame as she waited, languorous and hungry, for the sublime fire of those deadly kisses that awaited her, that seized and unstrung some strange Gordian knot within her body and then drained her of everything, leaving her an empty husk that could only hope to be filled and unfilled once again.
My dear one, you aren't afraid to die, are you?
Laura shuddered, not entirely certain that she had heard any words spoken. The logic of dreams was such that she could not always fathom the sounds of the room as distinct from her own thoughts, but in the confusion of the moment she reached out to touch a wrist as cold as ice and wrenched it first to and then away from her, even though she hadn't the ability to force a response from her stopped throat. There was a moment of clarity in that half-struggle when she realized that whatever she might have said would have made no difference, and while she did not quite surrender, Laura felt no true sense of pain when she felt the dint of two cold needles penetrating the wilted flesh of her breast.
Laura awoke to the graying light of morning awash in memories, her thin body shivering slightly at the coolness of the wet morning air. She looked at the window and saw that nothing had changed during the night, feeling a vague sense of the anticlimactic in that there was no evidence of any visitor. Standing haltingly, she drew near the glass and unbuttoned her nightdress, not knowing quite what to feel as an inspection of her body revealed none of the tell-tale marks that might speak to the reality of her dreams.
She was sobered, but now awake, she could not bring herself to dwell on her suspicions. She had learned over the many long and slow-moving years to put her youth, Styria, and all that happened there far from her mind. From that glum November when her father informed her that they would never truly return from their last "vacation," she had taken it as a duty to treat that period of her life as sealed - meticulously contained and imprisoned on the fifty-one leaves of paper that lay somewhere in Dr. Hessalius' records, waiting for their author to die that they might instruct some other poor victim of nature's monsters. Even when all else had passed away and there were no barons, doctors, generals, or fathers to grace her with gentle instruction, she had felt the palpable silence of their gaze, watching her bloom into a woman and thereafter decay into spinsterhood, and she had known all along that her protection lay in that quiet they imparted.
Mary remarked with perfect innocence that her mistress looked like she'd seen a ghost and gently teased as to whether or not it was the departed cousin. Laura remarked on her disrespect for the dead, causing the young girl to apologize three or four times in embarrassment. She took a somewhat larger breakfast to make up for the lack of dinner the night before and resumed her silent march through the estate, asking that, if at all possible, she be left to her own devices. Lunch, supper, and dinner could be whatever the cook determined, and Mary and Hettie could take the day off again. There was little, in any event, left to upkeep in the crumbling manor, and Laura reflected grimly that it should soon be left to another family to tend.
The halls were the same, and the garden looked much as she had left it. She noticed that many of the roses had begun to shed their petals and mused that it might be appropriate to finally have them trimmed back, picked, arranged, or even distilled some year, as she assumed most Englishwomen with roses in their care must do. There wasn't money enough to take on a gardener, of course, but she figured the maids had little enough to do and might find some joy in the task. She tore a blossom in her hand for a moment, letting a small shower of petals fall as she crumpled them, twirling about like severed wings before they landed on the ground.
She had a letter from the family solicitor that evening, indicating that the will of her dead relation had caused some property out in Kent to revert into her hands. She considered soberly that it must be sold, and began to draft a letter giving instructions as to the task, wondering somewhat morbidly as to what would happen when her own death left some poor soul to apportion the last corporeal holdings of her extinguished name. The library seemed to yawn about her, cavern-like, as she penciled out some notes for a more definitive missive, and although she never looked at it, she could feel the presence of that singular shelf as if it were looking down upon her. Calmet and his cousins: the Magia Posthumia, Phlegon de Mirabilibus, a small bound copy of the famous Visum et Repertum letter, and alongside them books on other oddities and lususes naturae. Her father had continued his sharp interest in the subject up until his death, and small brown parcels from all over the continent were forever pouring in to better populate the world of terrors that waited for them in the darkness. Laura the woman had learned for a time to sleep with knives under her pillow and charms over her windows, to stick tarred crosses to the thresholds and never invite in a stranger. She had dispensed slowly with these superstitions as her former guardians passed on, finding them at first to be painful remembrances and later to be unpleasant reminders.
When dusk finally approached, she was still lost in the same somber meditations. She wondered what her father, dead for so many decades, would have thought of her sleeping with an open window and somewhat impishly left it open again for a second night, even though the dampness of the weather made it far from desirable. As the paralysis of half-sleep stole over her, of course, she realized that there were other motivations to the action, things that she never would admit to while alone in the sterile world of wakefulness. Again she imagined she heard the light step on the carpet, and again she felt that warm-cold darkness descend upon her, filling her with terrors and joys that seemed too violent for her aging body to contain.
Are you ready to come to me, dear one? Are you ready?
She did not speak and tried her utmost not to think, for she was not certain that her "no" would suffice, and she imagined that any other thought would be taken as her assent. Again came the shower of kisses, the remembrance of those languid days when she would lie in their shared bed, unwilling to move from the sea of softness that surrounded their entwined bodies. Again came those feelings of loathing and desire, of transgression and transgressing, of being reduced to small sensations of flight and void. Again came that final caress, the pain of something colder than ice and sharper than steel burying itself within her.
She did not wake suddenly this time but stirred slowly from sleep as though something heavy weighed her down. The wind gently stung her cheeks which were wet with tears from blinking herself back into consciousness. It took her a while to remember what she had dreamt. Out of the corner of her vision, she thought she saw something fall or flutter from the open window, but there was nothing there when she finally pulled herself upright to check.
Another inspection before the mirror yielded no evidence, and she felt far from weary. There was a strange clarity, it seemed, to her mind, and she was able to quickly dispense with the letter to the lawyer before taking a late breakfast. Mary remarked that she seemed to be bearing her loss well, not being entirely cognizant of how impersonal a loss it was. Laura determined by the time that the table was cleared that she wasn't disposed to walking.
She returned to the library and pushed a footstool such that she could strain to reach the shelf she'd so often forbidden herself to contemplate. It was not entirely easy taking the books down, as all of them save the bound letter were rather weighty, requiring her to make an individual trip for each volume. When she was done, she latched the door and sat down, her hands trembling a little as she passed them over the books. She had read them all, of course, some multiple times, for in that season of her life where a sort of constant surveillance was deemed necessary, her father had been adamant she have the knowledge to muster her own defenses. She spent the day solemnly pouring over them, remembering old folk cures and the second hand accounts that had made up the latter days of her tutelage. She had a calm to her now, and she felt strange upon realizing that she no longer shuddered at the mention of the rituals of exorcism. The splash of heart's blood and the scream of the corpse no longer bore for her the horror they once had.
She looked in vain for that passage she'd remembered about Oltenia, although she knew well that the Olt lay far from Styria and farther from England. She wondered if she had imagined the words, for there was a sense of dreaminess that surrounded so much of her youthful life, obfuscating for her both that which had been real and that which had been fancy. Trying to put those days in the castle in perspective seemed impossible. They existed in a place to which she could not... was not allowed to return. She had not seen the end they'd made of the Countess, and there had never been a chance for the explanations that she craved. There were only admonitions and books and an endless interment in the cold clime of Britain. Nobody, neither Calmet, nor von Schertz, nor the men who bore witness to Plogojowitz could give her aught of what she desired.
Still, it could not hurt much more than anything else had to look, even if it were only for a day. She traced with a thin finger the woodcuts of wolves and maidens, of the crosshatched portraits of wild rose and hawthorn. All through the long day she read about those things that did not rest when buried. She was satisfied, in time, that whatever had haunted her over the past two nights was of her own devising, for there was no story that matched with her experience. None of the assembled host of creatures left their victims with no mark and no languor, and all rationality pointed towards bad dreams rather than the touch of the oupir. She contemplated for a brief moment the possibility of the mora, a small spherical devil that tried to strangle men and women while asleep, but there had never been a moment where she was short of breath, and such things, she read, were not seen this far to the north.
She was neither surprised nor relieved. Death had long since ceased to be a great terror to her, for she had spent so many years in weary living that she could not regard that final transformation as anything more monstrous than a change of season. The past haunted her more than the future, and her discomfort was not that she was in peril but rather that she had to bear the burden of memory. She contemplated laudanum as a temporary solution, but decided as the day wended its way towards dusk that the journey to the chemist was too much trouble for the respite.
It rained that night, and she felt apprehensive as she lay still between the sheets, waiting for whatever was to happen. Something in her went slack as the first peal of thunder sounded in the distance, and bidden or unbidden, her mind returned again to youth and to all those forbidden things that lay hidden within it. That brief and fast extinguished summer of her life was fast upon her, and she could in that moment possess all of it at once: the fat drops of dew that ran down her fingers as she picked and garlanded together crowns of violets, the languid light of the setting sun on her skin, the taste of chocolate on her companion's coral lips as they closed on hers. It was more present than the present, more real than reality, more everything than anything had been for the past seventy sterile years that lay between her and all she had loved. The swell of the beginning storm gave her a strange courage, and she tried to trace shapes, real or unreal, that might betray a second body in the darkness. She was not asleep – not at all – when she finally convinced herself, at long last, she was not alone.
Sometime after midnight, Mary Chapman was awakened by the sound of a sharp cry, ringing clear and crisp against the backdrop of the thrumming rain. She paused a good several minutes, uncertain if she had heard it, for the voice sounded quite unlike Miss Laura's, and knowing there to be no souls outside the estate for miles around, she could not fathom that there might be a stranger in the house. It made more sense to assume, at that gothic hour, that she had dreamt it. The single word that she thought she had heard made little sense in any event, and the more she tried to hold it in her mind, the less she found herself able to remember it. Long before the ancient clock in the drawing room struck one, she had slipped quite unwittingly back into the oblivion of sleep, still trying in vain to trace the soft form of a name she had never before heard and would soon completely forget.
The funeral was a dreary affair, and young Vordenburg hadn't the slightest clue whom it was he was supposed to be mourning. His father had gravely insisted that he be fetched from school and ferried to far flung England to attend the memorial of "an old family friend" who had apparently known his grandfather, and he had been just as grave in insisting that the boy not be given any further details until he was of such an age that he would be ready to receive them. He'd stopped asking after that, having no real desire to know anything else about the dead woman whose only significance to him was giving him the grace of delayed exams.
Aside from his suddenly enigmatic father and himself, only the woman's solicitor and servants were in attendance. One of the latter was a red-faced mess, a large degree of which young Vordenburg cynically attributed to her sudden want of employment. He recognized he hadn't the capacity to judge, however, as her attachment, even if it were only pecuniary, was far more genuine than anything he might lay claim to. Besides, he had been told she had been the one to find her, lying pale and supposedly smiling in the light of a dawn she couldn't see. He might be blubbering too if he'd tried to wake a corpse.
They all stood huddled alongside the parson as the wildly unseasonable first snow fluttered down around them. The hired pall bearers waited with the casket while the sexton fumbled for the keys to the crypt's door. "It's a strange thing to think that this will be the last time it's ever opened," his father said softly, "She was the last of her line, you know."
Young Vordenburg only nodded and did his best to appear saturnine. The event, he figured, was worth some gravitas if only to counterbalance how pathetic it was: a woman left with absolutely nobody but a handful of servants and strangers to see her to the next world. His English was in a lamentable enough state that he was barely able to parse the words said over her body by the parson, and it seemed almost fitting to the occasion when one of the pall bearers slipped a bit on the frozen over step. The casket didn't quite open, but for a moment the lid jostled out of its appropriate groove and was at an odd angle with the rest of the coffin. The four men didn't pause to fix it as they carried it into the dark of the tomb, but it was assumed that such minute details would be looked to once they were disburdened. There was nothing to else to be done, in any event.
He'd turned away, ready to amble back towards the carriage, when his father clapped a hand on his shoulder to stop him. No words were exchanged, but he saw a severity in man's face that gave him pause. He quietly turned back to face the crypt, which was now in the process of being closed for the final time.
Squinting, he saw something move in the falling snow, and it took him a few glances to confirm that he wasn't mistaken. Two pale butterflies were sluggishly flapping about near the face of the tomb, flitting about in the gray light like the ghosts of flowers. Vordenburg wondered how they'd survived the sudden shock of the flurry.
“Look at that,” he said, pointing. “The poor things are probably about to die.”
“Most things do,” was his father's solemn observation.