Prologue of Carmilla This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox .org. Recording by Louise J. Bell Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu Prologue Upon a paper attached to the narrative which follows, Dr. Hesselius has written a rather elaborate note, which he accompanies with a reference to his essay on the strange subject which the manuscript illuminates. This mysterious subject he treats in that essay with his usual learning and acumen, and with remarkable directness and condensation. It will form but one volume of the series of that extraordinary man's collected papers. As I publish the case in this volume simply to interest the laity, I shall forestall the intelligent lady who relates it in nothing, and after due consideration, I have determined, therefore, to abstain from presenting any precie of the learned doctor's reasoning, or extract from his statement on a subject which he describes as involving, not improbably, some of the profoundest arcana of our dual existence and its intermediates. I was anxious on discovering this paper to reopen the correspondence commenced by Dr. Hesselius so many years before, with a person so clever and careful as his informant seems to have been. Much to my regret, however, I found that she had died in the interval. She probably could have added little to the narrative, which she communicates in the following pages, with, so far as I can pronounce, such conscientious particularity. End of Prologue Chapter 1 of Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 1. An Early Fright In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle or schloss. A small income in that part of the world goes a great way. Eight or nine hundred a year does wonders. Scantily enough, ours would have answered among wealthy people at home, but we would have been left with nothing. My father is English, and I bear an English name, although I never saw England. But here, in this lonely and primitive place, where everything is so marvelously cheap, I really don't see how ever so much more money would at all materially add to our comforts, or even luxuries. My father was in the Austrian service, and retired upon a pension and his patrimony, and purchased this feudal residence and the smallest estate on which it stands, a bargain. Nothing can be more picturesque or solitary. It stands on a slight eminence in a forest. The road, very old and narrow, passes in front of its drawbridge, never raised in my time, and its moat, stocked with perch and sailed over by many swans, and floating on its surface, white fleets of water lilies. Over all this, the schloss shows its many -windowed front, its towers, and its Gothic chapel. The forest opens in an irregular and very picturesque glade before its gate, and at the right, a steep Gothic