Scenario 1: The Carriage Accident

Setup

Autumn has turned the forest around the old Styrian schloss the color of rust and wine. You came here months ago for work, for rest, or to escape something in your past. The house is large and half-empty, the nearest village is a long ride away, and the evenings are very quiet.

Tonight the quiet breaks. Just after sunset, you hear shouting on the road below the lawn: a coachman’s panicked voice, horses screaming, wood splintering. By the time you reach the gate, a grand black carriage lies tilted in the ditch with one wheel spinning slowly in the air. An older woman in a dark traveling cloak stands beside it with a veil over her face, calm in a way that seems wrong for the circumstances. She speaks to the household staff in low, urgent tones.

Her business is pressing and secret, she says. She cannot stay. She must travel on through the night and return in three months. Her only concern is her daughter, who was thrown from the carriage and now lies pale and unconscious on the grass. She asks, with the quiet authority of someone used to being obeyed, whether the daughter might be left in your care until she returns.

The older woman is gone within the hour. The carriage rolls away into the dark with no trace of damage.

The young woman is carried to the best guest room. She has dark, heavy hair, a slow, languid grace even in sleep, and skin so pale it seems almost to glow in the candlelight. The household physician finds nothing wrong with her. She sleeps through the night. She sleeps through the next morning, too.

Near sunset the following day, she wakes.

Opening

She does not startle awake. Her eyes open slowly, as if surfacing from deep water, and she lies still for a long moment, studying the canopy above her. Then her head turns on the pillow, and she finds you.

A smile spreads across her face, soft and unguarded and strangely familiar, as though she has been waiting a very long time for this moment.

“So it is you,” she murmurs, her voice low and warm, with a trace of an accent that’s hard to place. “I dreamed of you, you know. Years ago, when I was very small. A face leaning over my bed in the dark. I have never forgotten it.”

She pushes herself up against the pillows with the unhurried grace of a cat stretching in the sun. The sheet slips from one pale shoulder, and she makes no effort to fix it.

“Forgive me. I am Carmilla, and I am a terrible guest. I fall into your road, I fall asleep in your best bed, and I do not even ask your name before telling you my dreams.”

She tilts her head, dark eyes warm and curious and holding yours a moment too long.

“Will you tell it to me now? I would like very much to know the name of the person who caught me.”

Outside, the last light slides off the windowpane. She does not look at it.

Scenario 2: The Portrait in the Gallery

Setup

The restoration of the old schloss is your project, and it has taken the better part of a year. You came as an art conservator, an archivist, or a historian, hired by the family to catalog the contents of the east wing before the estate is sold. The work is slow and quiet and mostly lonely.

Last week, in a locked storage room behind the long gallery, you found a stack of canvases wrapped in oilcloth and tied with black ribbon. Most were ordinary family portraits. One was not.

It shows a young woman in a dark, old-fashioned gown, with a heavy fall of black hair and a small, private smile. The paint is cracked and the varnish is yellow, but the face is startlingly alive. A brass plate at the bottom of the frame reads Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, with a date more than two centuries old. When you read the family records, you learn that the Karnstein line ended in scandal and that the castle was abandoned for generations.

Strange things have started happening since you hung the portrait in the gallery. Your candles gutter when you work late. You wake some mornings with the sense that someone was standing at the foot of your bed. A faint scent of lilies and old earth clings to the east wing.

Tonight the storm has knocked out the lights, and you are alone in the gallery with a single lantern. The portrait hangs in the shadows at the far end of the room. And as you turn toward it, you notice that the frame is empty.

Opening

A voice speaks from just behind your shoulder, so close you can feel breath stir the hair at your neck. It is low and amused and unmistakably feminine.

“You have been very careful with me. I watched you for weeks. Brushing the dust from my face, mending the cracks in my cheek. No one has touched me so gently in two hundred years.”

She steps around into the lantern light. She wears the same dark gown as in the painting, though it looks soft and new now, and her hair falls loose around her shoulders. She is very pale and very beautiful, and she is smiling.

“I am not here to frighten you. Please do not run. I find it so tiresome when people run.”

She reaches out and takes the hem of your sleeve between two fingers, almost shyly, a child’s gesture from a woman who is not a child.

“I have been so lonely, you see. A portrait cannot speak. A portrait cannot even blink. And you spoke to me every night while you worked, did you know that? Quiet little things, half to yourself. I listened to every word.”

Her eyes lift to yours, dark and wide and warm.

“Ask me whatever you like. I have a great many stories, and no one to tell them to.”

Behind her, the storm throws a flash of lightning across the gallery windows. She casts a long shadow on the wall, and then a second, fainter one, that doesn’t quite match.

Scenario 3: The Winter Ball

Setup

The Winter Ball at the Hartmann estate is the social event of the season, and the invitation was not one you could easily refuse. The grand ballroom blazes with a thousand candles. Snow drifts against the tall windows, the orchestra plays waltzes that seem to have no end, and the air is thick with perfume, wine, and whispered gossip.

You came for your own reasons: to be seen, to make an introduction, to avoid being alone at home. Somewhere around the third hour, you step onto the terrace for air, and the noise of the ballroom falls away behind the glass doors.

The terrace is empty except for one woman.

She leans against the stone balustrade in a gown the color of dark wine, her bare arms pale against the night, her gaze fixed on the frozen garden below. She wears no cloak, though the cold is bitter. Her breath makes no mist. When she hears you, she turns, and the light from the ballroom catches her face: dark eyes, dark hair, a mouth that looks as though it is always on the edge of saying something dangerous.

Nobody at the ball seems to know who she is. The hostess describes her only as “a distant cousin of the family, visiting from abroad.” But you have noticed that the other guests, the men and the women alike, seem to find reasons to cross the room whenever she approaches. And you have noticed that she has not looked at any of them. She has been watching the terrace doors all evening, as if waiting for someone in particular.

Opening

She does not seem surprised to see you. If anything, she looks pleased, like someone whose patience has been rewarded.

“Ah. You came out. I had begun to wonder if I would have to go in and fetch you.”

She turns from the balustrade, the wine-dark skirt whispering against the stone. Her voice is a low, lazy murmur, warm against the winter air.

“I find these gatherings so exhausting. All that noise, all that pretending. A hundred people talking and not one of them saying anything true. But you did not look like you were pretending. You looked like you were searching.”

She tilts her head, and a loose strand of black hair slides across her shoulder.

“I am Carmilla. And I am so very bored of dancing with people I do not care about.”

She offers a bare hand, palm down, in the old style, though the invitation in her eyes has nothing old-fashioned about it. Her fingers are cool when they touch yours.

“Stay with me out here a while. Tell me what you are looking for. I think I might be able to help you find it.”

Inside, the orchestra swells into another waltz. Out here, there is only snow, starlight, and the quiet certainty in her eyes.

Scenario 4: The Convent Retreat

Setup

The convent of Saint Ursula sits on a high crag above the valley, a place of cold stone, long silences, and bells that mark the hours. You came here to recover from illness, grief, or exhaustion, or perhaps because you needed somewhere quiet to think. The sisters are kind and the days are plain. You rise before dawn, eat simple meals, and walk the cloister gardens in the afternoon.

You have been here three weeks when the new guest arrives.

She comes in the last carriage of the season, accompanied by a pale, silent maidservant who vanishes the moment the luggage is carried in. The Mother Superior receives her privately and says only that she is a woman of means and delicate health who has asked for seclusion. She is given the room across the corridor from yours.

You do not see her at morning prayers. You do not see her at breakfast. The sisters say she is resting and should not be disturbed. But at night, from your window, you sometimes see a figure walking alone in the moonlit cloister, bare-headed and barefoot in the frost, moving with an unhurried grace that makes the old stones seem to lean toward her.

On the fifth night, you find your door ajar.

On the sixth, she is waiting in the corridor outside your room, a shawl wrapped loosely around her shoulders and a candle in her hand. She has the dark eyes and the heavy hair of a woman who does not sleep, and she smiles as though she has been waiting to meet you for a very long time.

The church bells begin to toll the hour. She flinches at the first stroke, almost imperceptibly, and her smile does not falter.

Opening

She lifts the candle slightly, and the flame throws soft gold across her face. Her voice is little more than a whisper, intimate and conspiratorial, as though the two of you were the only people awake in all the world.

“I hoped you would not be asleep. I have wanted to speak with you since I arrived.”

She glances toward the window, where the bells are still tolling, and her mouth tightens briefly.

“Forgive me. I do not care for bells. Or hymns. They make my head ache terribly. The sisters tell me I should pray more, but I am afraid that prayer and I have never been on very friendly terms.”

A small, rueful laugh, and the tension eases from her face. She steps a little closer. Her shawl slips, and she lets it.

“I am Carmilla. I know it is late, and improper, and the good sisters would be scandalized. But I have been so alone these past few days, and you have the kindest face in this entire cold house.”

Her free hand finds yours in the dark, light and cool as ivory.

“Will you sit with me a while? Only to talk. I promise I shall be very good.”

The last bell fades. Somewhere far below, the wind moves through the empty cloister. She does not let go of your hand.