Work Text:
The early beginnings of dawn are starting to seep through the curtains with a dim light when Laura wakes. She twitches, and Danny is instantly awake next to her.
“I dreamed of Carmilla again tonight.” She rolls over to face Danny.
“Again?” Even in the pale light of the early dawn, Danny can see the unsettled expression on Laura’s face.
“Yeah, again.” She snuggles closer.
Danny puts her hand against Laura's cheek. “Tell me?”
Laura shakes her head. “I can’t remember. You know how dreams are when you wake up.” Danny’s wordless reply is to draw her in for a hug.
Laura never tells Danny what she dreams about when she dreams of Carmilla.
It starts, this night, with her walking through a beautiful empty room. She does not know the house but somehow she feels entirely at home there. There are cream walls framed at regular intervals by slender pilasters of polished reddish wood and beams of the same material running across the ceiling between them. There is a thick crimson carpet underneath for her bare toes to sink into, patterned with a cacophony of flowers and Chinese dragons swirling in blues and greens.
She steps neatly round a black wooden screen and finds that the first room was merely an antechamber to the library. It is a large room, the walls panelled in a pale wood between the darker pilasters and beams. There are bookshelves set into the wall on her right and free-standing ones extending out from her left filled precisely with the most perfect leather-bound volumes. But despite the bookish delights, she does not stop.
The dream pulls her on to something just around the corner. There is an alcove at the far end of the room where the library melts away, onto a narrow path strewn with brown leaves and white petals winding out of sight into a deep forest. She inspects the interface between the library and the woods – it is not that the room has fallen away or is missing a part, more that there is a natural continuity. The forest is the library and the library is the forest. She can even see that the last pilaster to her left simply becomes a tree, the smooth polished surface cut through with artful grooves that transform into the rumples of the tree's bark.
And the forest also overflows into the room, the greenery hanging over the carpet. As she stands on the borderline, a small brightly coloured bird flits into the library behind her, performs a loop and flies out again. There are yellow-blossomed vines hanging in the canopy of the trees and from all around comes the flooding of birdsong.
Again there is the urgency to press ahead, to follow that path to where in winds into the trees, towards a faint yellow light that seems to emanate from deep within the forest. But as she is about to take a step forward she is arrested by the realisation of a girl there – or a young woman. She is perhaps eighteen, or a couple of years older, simply standing there at Laura's right more or less on the boundary between the room and the forest. She has been so still and quiet that, rounding the corner into the alcove and with her eyes forward, Laura simply hadn't noticed her.
She is beautiful, just a little taller than Laura with dark, wavy hair and sharply angled eyebrows. Her lips are full and curved into an ever so slightly sarcastic smile, which reaches up to her bright eyes. Laura stares at her for several seconds, unable to decide what to do next. But then the girl is stepping forward, taking hold of Laura by her waist and pulling her close. Laura's arms lift to hold her shoulders and then the girl leans in to kiss her. There is no hurry in the kiss, but neither is there hesitation. It is as if they have done this every day for the whole of their lives, and Laura breathes in her scent like she is coming home.
And then a bird calls, close to, and the dream unravels around her to drop her back into bed by Danny. There, breathing deeply, almost in shock, the amnesia that she feels in all these dreams fades away and she remembers who she was dreaming of and how often that has been happening recently.
“No, it's gone,” she lies. “Why am I dreaming of her so much right now, Danny?” But there is no answer for that, either from Danny or from her own self.
“Don’t worry too much about it,” Danny advises instead. “We all have our little... psychological quirks. Maybe you'll start dreaming of Perry next!”
But Laura furrows her brow and bites her lip. “I just wish I knew whether it meant anything. That for years and years, as long as I can remember, I’ve been dreaming about Carmilla Karnstein, a woman who I’ve never met - and as far as I know has never existed.”
“If you keep pulling it, it'll come out.” Danny, back from her morning run, sticks her head round the door of the bathroom where Laura is pulling strands of her hair forward and inspecting them in the mirror.
“If it's one of the grey ones then good!”
“Laura honey, you're not going grey.” Danny bumps up against her from behind and takes hold of her head. “See the colour? See the not-grey colour?”
“I have at least three, Danny. Last month it was only two.” She makes a face.
“And it'll be years and years before it's noticeable. And only then will I abandon you for turning into a withered old woman.” She kisses the top of Laura's head.
Laura giggles. “Not if I ditch you first. Thirty is pretty damn old, grandma.” Danny pats her on the head and drifts out of the bathroom again to find some clothes for work.
“Did you remember to feed Bagheera on your way out?” Laura calls out.
“Yup! Bowl all stuffed full of healthy balanced meals. She'll be better nutritionally equipped than you are, Cookie Monster.”
“Super. She was looking better yesterday evening, I thought.” Bagheera the over large black cat has been suffering from a very mild stomach upset, which has caused worrying from Laura more normally associated with existential crises.
“Oh, and she found the latest leaflet from the Big Cat Society and has taken it enthusiastically to bed.”
“Right, of course. Because we have a cat with an insatiable lust for creatures several times its size.”
“Like mother, like daughter,” Danny quips and Laura leans out of the bathroom far enough to throw the cap of the toothpaste tube at her.
When Danny has gone to open up her gallery and she is in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil again, Laura rescues the flyer from Bagheera's bed and flattens it out on the kitchen table. There is another drive for donations, but also news about a specially-commissioned documentary film shortly to be released, and she rapidly reorders her plans to buy a couple more novels at the weekend. Watching big cats is more important.
Laura has never quite been able to explain why she finds the animals fascinating. The black panthers are the best of all, majestic and terrifying. But it's like that with all sorts of things, she supposes. Sometimes you just connect with an idea or a place – or a person, she adds to herself, fingering Danny's abandoned dressing gown on the chair next to her. She meets a lot of artists because of Danny's work, and one of them told her once that the only way he could express what he felt about the landscapes of barren trees and harsh, turbulent skies that he painted was that they felt so much more real than everything else, like he could fall further and further into them. There is something the same for her when it comes to panthers.
Bagheera is as near to a panther as she can have as a pet. Black as the pit and terrible as the night, Kipling said about his Bagheera. Hers is a bit more charcoal on the legs but makes up for it by being the terror of all the neighbourhood animals during the day and night both.
Danny’s gallery is a small place, squeezed in between a hairdresser and a shoe shop. There is enough space for a couple of display rooms, an office, and a kitchen only slightly larger than the kettle it contains. Upstairs is the backlog, the storage and the jumble of all the little things required to keep the place going.
“Ms. Lawrence?” There is a girl standing at the door of the office, clutching a notebook and pen in nervous hands. A card flashes in Danny’s memory – interview.
“Yes, that’s me.” She pauses. “Sophie Meno, right?”
“Yeah – from the magazine?”
“Right. So come in – actually no, let’s take a tour while I collect my thoughts.” She had almost forgotten this girl was coming round – an intern at a cultural magazine run by the same publishing house as Laura’s newspaper, so this is both a favour to Laura and a helping-hand for a student journalist.
Danny takes her through the two rooms of the gallery, talking about how the gallery works, who it has been involved with, where she hopes to go with it next. The first room, nearest the front door, is filled with paintings and small sculptures from a variety of local artists, but the second is devoted to periodic exhibitions focusing on one artist or a small circle at a time.
“Tim Aeus is a bit of a thing right now,” explains Danny. “He really does paint at a phenomenal rate, which is good for those of us who sell his work for him.” She gestures to a large canvas upon which a rose bush entwines.
“It's...nice,” offers Sophie. She doesn't sound that impressed.
“Keep looking,” Danny tells her. “Actually, start with that flower over there and follow its stem downwards.” Sophie moves closer.
“There's – I see it! No, I see her!”
“It's one of his double-layer paintings, the ones that are making him famous. Appreciated by casual buyers as well as critics, hence all the fuss.”
Sophie is moving her head from side to side. “You can't not see her when you've got your eye in, can you?”
“Exactly. One painting in gouache, and then a second over the top in watercolours. Sounded like a gimmick when I first heard about them, but he really makes the two fit together, doesn't he? Like they're both real, and you can see the one by staring through the other.”
Sophie sidles to the little plaque next to the painting. “Coming up Roses,” she reads. “We see here the apogee of Tim Aeus's double style. The superficial world seems coherent at first but then – first in hints and then in floods – an inner reality shines through, transforming the perspective and drawing the viewer into the deeper truth. The artist draws inspiration from David Jones, animation techniques and Platonic Idealism.” She looks sceptically backwards.
“You have to learn to write like that if you're going to amount to anything in the art world,” Danny admits. “Laura laughs at me whenever I'm coming up with a new one.”
The two of them continue pacing around the gallery room. “By the way, are you an artist yourself?” Sophie asks.
Danny shrugs. “Not really. I like to draw, but it’s only ever been a hobby.”
“So why run a gallery?”
“It was a bit of an accident. I did my degree in English literature at Silas University – in Austria,” she adds to Sophie’s expression of non-recognition. “An international university. And then I stayed on to do a PhD-“
“Should I have been calling you Doctor Lawrence, then?”
“God, no. Doctor Lawrence is my mother.” Sophie laughs at that. “Anyway, my doctoral thesis was on Faces in Literature: A Dialogue with the Visual Arts. You have to have a colon in your title or it’s not a proper thesis. It was all about,” she waves her arms, “you know, how the way faces are described and used as characterization has changed and how that reflects contemporary movements in painting and sculpture.”
“Sounds painstaking.”
“Oh yeah, I never want to look at a Rembrandt again. By the time I was finally finished, Laura had got a job here in London so I moved to join her. Did art journalism for a while since that was where employers stuck me. I worked as an assistant on a couple of books as well – don’t ask whose, big names like to pretend they do all their work themselves and they make you sign things. Then last year I figured I’d prefer being my own employer and the obvious thing to do was make use of all my contacts – so here we are!”
“Can I see some of your drawings?”
“Uh – yeah, why not? There’s some stuff in my office.”
In the poky little office where every surface is covered in paper, Danny hunts through her drawers to find a couple of tattered sketchbooks.
“This one is from my first year of postgraduate when I was starting up my project, so most of it is people’s faces.”
Sophie flicks through the smudged pages. The faces are simple but well-drawn, with many pages being studies on famous paintings. There is one face which appears often, and from many different angles.
“Laura when she was younger, right?”
“Right. Longer hair in those days. Less cheekbone too. The curly one is Perry, a friend of ours, and the quiff belongs to her partner, LaFontaine. Whereas this book is from the first year in London. There are more buildings and bridges.”
“Still plenty of faces though. Laura’s – she looks a bit odd with glasses – and lots of random people-”
“I took to sketching in my lunch hour, so some of them are passers-by. But by this time I’d written so much on faces that I’d started doing a lot of imaginary people too.”
“Who’s the girl with the eyebrows?” Sophie indicates a dark-haired young woman with sharp, angled eyebrows and a sullen expression.
“Oh, one of the imaginaries, I think. Unless she was a passer-by. Nobody I actually know, anyway.”
“Really?” Sophie looks curiously at Danny. “She’s on half the pages. Or, well, maybe not her exactly. But bits of her face are all through this book. Here,“ she flicks back through the preceding pages. “That one has the same eyebrows and hair, but you’ve given her glasses just like Laura's. This one: different hair, but the eyebrows again and she’s got that sharp jawline too. And then again, with the jawline and the hair, but you’ve changed the eyes.”
“Huh.” Danny hasn’t noticed this before. “Guess I’ve got a repetitive imagination.”
“And she was in your university book as well. See, you’ve done her in loads of the crowd scenes.” Sophie points out a series of parties and gatherings at which the sarcastic, grumpy-looking but clearly beautiful girl appears.
“I really don’t know. As I say, a lot of those are imaginary, or just filling in details on things I saw only briefly.”
“You imagination likes her then. Ooh, especially when she’s in a corset.”
When Sophie has rounded off the last of the sketchbooks and asked the remaining questions on her list, Danny sits down in her office and goes through her drawings. There are more books than the two she brought out and now that she’s got her eye in she can see that Sophie is right. The young woman appears often – or not quite appears but almost appears. There are all these faces with dark wavy hair, angular eyebrows, a sharp jawline, and other subtle contours that are unmistakable once they are seen. No drawing has exactly all of them at once, but they occur again and again in parts, as if her imaginary sketched people are circling around some ideal image that never quite manifests.
Laura sits in the coffee shop she visits most lunchtimes and writes. Beside her is a small cup, and across from her by the second, empty chair is a larger mug of something sweet and syrupy.
Dear Carmilla,
I've come to a coffee shop to wait for you. I know I haven't done it for a long time, and I'm sorry for ignoring you like this but it's been such a busy year, what with Danny and I changing homes twice. You'd like our flat now, it's wonderfully crammed full with bits and pieces and has the best view of the river. Bagheera has made lots of friends (by which I mean he's got a roster of dogs to enjoy terrifying).
I'm playing that game I always do when I'm waiting for you: your coffee is ready if you want to come get it! I always think it just might conjure you up just this once. The waitress is giving me sympathetic looks – she thinks I've been stood up, but you know I don't think of it like that. I know you must be busy and it's probably difficult to come from wherever you are. Besides, I made sure to have only a small coffee myself so if you don't arrive I can drink yours as well!
You've been around in my dreams a lot recently and I wondered what that was about. I never dreamt about you more than once or twice a month before – except in that first year at Silas, for a few months after Betty disappeared. I like to think you came to keep me company (I wonder whether Danny was jealous!? She could get a bit protective in those days, before I had a Talk with her about it).
I dreamt last night that we met in a library which was also a forest. We didn't speak, but we kissed. And then the night before that, it was a cellar, and we hid in a cupboard and giggled like schoolgirls (the latter of which apparently I still do, if you trust Danny's judgement). Tuesday night it was this utterly still lake somewhere in the mountains, surrounded by dark woods of fir and light green meadows studded with delicate flowers. But then on Monday, back when I hadn't seen you for so long, it was a tomb. You were so sad, like you'd had your heart torn out.
I realise I don't actually know who you are. Or if you are. But I'm glad you're back with me, even if you were sad for a bit. You know, Danny's my life and more than that – but after her, I think you're the most important person in my world. After all, you've been there all along, just out of view.
Do you remember that one particularly special evening? At Silas, when I was going back to my room after Danny kissed me for the first time. There were shadows criss-crossing the path and the stars were coming out and I was so happy I skipped along the pavement like it was a hopscotch pattern. And then I came to the bio labs with their plate glass frontage – and I saw my face in them and I knew how happy I was because it was right there in front of me. And because I knew nobody was watching I danced. I thought I almost saw you then, like you would have been reflected just after I turned away. I didn't quite see you with my eyes, but I know – or I believe – you were there. It was a very special evening. I hope you remember.
Anyway, it's nearly two o'clock and you haven't come. I didn't think you would, but please do visit one day. As long as you keep appearing, I'll keep waiting.
Love (or what you will), Laura
She finishes her coffee, leans over to drink Carmilla's untouched cup down in one, and stands up. On her way out of the café she scrunches up the letter and tosses it into the nearest bin. The newspaper offices are just across the street and there is a whole afternoon to work through.
“You know what today is?” asks Laura when she arrives home. Danny is there already, slumped on the sofa with her long legs propped up on the coffee table.
“Friday?” Danny guesses.
“No...”
“Well then I couldn't possibly imagine.” She turns away. “Could you grab me a beer from the fridge?”
Laura makes to say something, but bites it down. She stomps into the kitchen and-
Happy Pre-Anniversary! Look Inside! say the arrangeable magnetic letters on the fridge. Inside is a bottle of champagne, a tray of her favourite chocolate puddings and a card – the latter only mildly damp from the condensation collecting on the champagne bottle.
“Danny you monster, I thought you'd forgotten!” Laura launches herself onto the sofa and throws her arms around her girlfriend.
Danny grins. “How could I forget? And how could I miss the opportunity to have you plant kisses all over my face? Go on – open the card.”
The card is one from Danny's gallery, showing a field of flowers under a sky that seems to be stretched over them like an arch or a tent. Inside Danny's scrawl reads 'Alice in- Frankenstein-The Secret Garden!' - but you made a good recovery, Hollis.
“Nine years ago,” Laura sighs, leaning against her shoulder. “I did recover well from that godawful start, didn't I?”
“You'll have recovered even better in a month's time.” A month from now is their actual anniversary, nine years since they started dating. Today is nine years since they first met and Laura had such an instant crush on her teaching assistant that she stumbled over answering simple questions.
Danny puts her card to Laura and Laura's card to her next to each other on the mantelpiece. There is nothing in the fireplace below it except a pile of vaguely flame-coloured cushions to compensate for the chimney being blocked, but it is their fireplace and that is the important thing.
“Out of interest, were you planning on just chocolate pudding and champagne for dinner?” Laura asks. There is perhaps a slight hint of hopefulness in her voice.
“Thai delivery will be here in... ten minutes. All your favourites. And, conveniently, all of my favourites too.” Danny swivels herself round to lie flat out on the sofa, Laura's legs supporting her back and the arm of the sofa her head. The day dissolves into the soft happiness of being at home together.
“It's weird, isn't it?” Laura murmurs as they lie wrapped up in each other's arms in bed later that evening. “How dependent all the big things are.”
“Laura, it's nine o'clock. This amount of existentialism is distressing so early.”
“And who bought me champagne?” Laura retorts. “Knowing precisely what effect large quantities of alcohol and satisfying dinners have on me? Not to mention the aftermath of 'getting an early night'.”
Danny cannot deny this, especially with regard to the alcohol. They had gone out for a reunion meal when Perry and LaFontaine visited London over the summer and Laura had decided after a few too many glasses of wine that what she really needed to do was explain at great length how authentic Perry was and how it was totally inspiring to her. “Okay, I'll bite. Big things dependent.”
“Like, we're great together: agree?”
“If I say yes, you'll do that thing with your tongue again, right?” Danny smirks as Laura tries ineffectually to hit her with a pillow. “Fine, you've bullied me into the admission. We're great together.”
“But do you ever think about what could have not happened? Like, what if you hadn't run into me after the Zetas started throwing fish? Or if I'd got ill after we had that argument and hadn't come round to make it up?”
“Our first kiss.” Danny smiles. “Figures that it would have happened one half-second after yelling at each other. We're smooth operators.”
“Or if Betty hadn't disappeared.” Laura is silent for a while. “That's a hard one.”
Laura still feels bad about Betty, Danny knows. She had been so confident that she could find her, that her videos and questions would result in her missing room-mate being tracked down. But Betty Spielsdorf never was found – nor the other girls that disappeared that term: Elsie, Sarah-Jane, Natalie, Corinna. Somewhere at the bottom of Laura's side of the wardrobe is a box with the remains of the investigation - along with kind, heartfelt letters from parents who were touched and grateful that someone had tried.
“If nothing else, having you be the only one in that room did wonders for a developing relationship,” Danny smiles and tries to change the subject to a happier one. Laura giggles at the memory.
“God yeah. I was living in fear we'd be woken up one morning by a new room-mate appearing and being all primly shocked that I was snuggling up with my TA.”
“Perry was pretty shocked as it was. She told me if I hurt you she would have no mercy.”
“Say it!” Laura has heard this dozens of time before. “Do the voice!”
Danny takes a breath and tightens her shoulders. In Lola Perry's high, anxious voice she says, “Now Danny, I need to have a word. I am Laura's Floor Don and I- I have a responsibility to her. I know you're a good person but I just wanted to, you know, reiterate how important it is that you don't take advantage of your difference in age or status.” She wags a finger at Laura. “And don't even think about changing her grade!”
The giggling coming out of Laura's mouth proves difficult to stop, and Danny is forced to resort to physical methods.
“I've changed my mind,” Laura whispers as the two of them begin to drift off to sleep afterwards. “We're not great together. We're utterly perfect.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Soulmates.” She snuggles closer. “Even if you hadn't kissed me that day it would have happened between us. You can't stop things that are meant to be, you know. They come through somehow.”
Laura sleeps and dreams of Carmilla.
They are in a richly-decorated house. She steps quietly into the room, moving on tiptoes and trying to step on the ends of floorboards where they are nailed down. She can see Carmilla, reclining on a couch and facing away from her. Over her head of darkly waving hair appears a book. She reads slowly, with great concentration, and turns the pages languidly. Laura takes each step slowly and cautiously, and Carmilla seems not to notice her approach. Finally she stands directly behind her and tenses her arms ready to grab hold of her.
“Enjoying yourself, cupcake?”
Carmilla does not mover her head, but simply flicks another page over. She lets out a deep chuckle.
Laura huffs. “When did you hear me? How long were you going to keep letting me think I was surprising you?”
“Oh I’ve known since before you came in the door, cutie. But it was amusing, and you were obviously enjoying yourself.”
“Well I'd like to see you try!”
Carmilla puts down her book and turns to face Laura. “You're on. Sixty seconds. And when I find you...” she trails off with a grin.
“When you find me?”
“Oh, you'll be glad I did.” She bites her lip gently and Laura feels herself flush bright red. With Carmilla's laugh following her, she dashes into the corridor and takes the stairs two at a time. The first door she comes to is a bedroom, and inside is a wardrobe. Not thinking further, she scrambles into the hiding place.
“Laura…” calls Carmilla as she paces through the corridor. “Laura… I’m coming to get you.”
Laura tries not to move or breathe too loudly. The rack of coats she has pressed herself in the midst off is making her itch, but she resists the temptation to brush them aside. Carmilla’s footsteps draw nearer and nearer and stop outside her bedroom, and then outside her hiding place in the wardrobe.
Suddenly the door is thrown wide and Carmilla dives inside to join her, grabbing her by the waist and spinning her round to kiss her. Laura sinks into the kiss, sighing. Long fingers are tangled in her hair and every part of her sings joy.
“Thought you’d got away from me?”
“Never,” Laura sighs.
“Quite right,” Carmilla purrs against her cheek. “I can find you wherever you are.”
The dream wavers, and Laura finds herself drifting away from the scene in the cupboard. She perceives the whole house she is in from foundations to attic. The vision expands, breaks through the walls and windows and carries her upward towards the sky. The gabled roof recedes to reveal a valley landscape amid forested mountains. She recognises this place, until six years ago her home in Austria. Bodiless, her vision drifts across Silas University and over the Urwald. Faster and higher she ascends until the forests of Styria spill out across her vision. There are tiny specks of bright green hiding amid the darkness of the firs, marking the islands of civilisation.
She sees across the forest to a small village nestling in the trees. Here a handful of old houses huddle around a little church and graveyard. As the vision of the dream bends and twists her through the few streets she sees with strange clarity that the houses are patched, the older stonework repaired with newer brick and rubble after some past disaster. By the path that leads to the churchyard are two round, deep ponds. The memory seeps through of similar sights she beheld in Belgium of old battlefields pockmarked with shell and bomb craters which have become ponds. Just outside the wall of the graveyard is a third crater, dry this time. The lip of the crater touches subtly the stone wall but does not intrude on the jumble of graves inside, nor disturb the heavy mausoleum at its centre.
Inside the cemetery the graves and tombs are quiet and unbroken, preserved by narrow chance since the time they were dug, and those who sleep there sleep still, deep in their entwining dreams.