Carmilla and laura, p.1
Carmilla and Laura, page 1
Table of Contents
Quotes
Other books by SD Simper
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Carmilla and Laura
Foreword
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Dark
Light
Epilogue
Author's Note
Further Reading
The Sting of Victory: Prologue
The Sting of Victory: Chapter 1
Author
Praise for FALLEN GODS:
Beneath the fantasy and horror, a simmering love story brews. One that left me uneasy and completely unsure how to feel. Not because Ms. Simper failed, but because she succeeded so very, very well.
-Evie Drae, author of Beauregard and the Beast
Simper has created a brilliant combination of gruesomely dark fantasy and scorching romance. The protagonists are both so flawed, you are at once drawn to and repelled by them. Simper takes the idea of grey morality and writes it to perfection.
-The Lesbian Review
Simper has created a complex, immersive world for the series and that’s not even touching on the well-developed characters or the complicated, fucked up relationship you can’t help but ship anyway.
-Manic Femme Reviews
Praise for SEA AND STARS:
“If you like your fantasy with an extra dark twist, exceptional world building and deeply complex characters then reel this book in fast. You’ll be hooked.”
-The Lesbian Review
“The Fate of Stars, the first book in the Sea and Stars trilogy, is delightfully dark and sexy, full of lush imagery, vibrant characterization, and enough adrenaline to keep me up way past my bedtime.”
-Anna Burke, award winning author of THORN and COMPASS ROSE
Praise for Carmilla and Laura:
A beautiful retelling . . . perfect for anyone who likes darker-themed romance, horror stories, or plain ol’ lesbian vampires.
-The Lesbian 52
Other books by S D Simper:
The Sting of Victory (Fallen Gods 1)
Among Gods and Monsters (Fallen Gods 2)
Blood of the Moon (Fallen Gods 3)
Tear the World Apart (Fallen Gods 4)
Eve of Endless Night (Fallen Gods 5)
Carmilla and Laura
Beneath the Dark Moon (Sea and Stars Prequel)
The Fate of Stars (Sea and Stars 1)
Heart of Silver Flame (Sea and Stars 2)
Death’s Abyss (Sea and Stars 3)
The Moon, the Stars, and the Desert Below
(Patreon Exclusive)
Beneath the Loch
Forthcoming books:
Chaos Undone (Fallen Gods 6) – TBA
Fallen Gods Series 2 - TBA
‘
S D SIMPER
©2018 Endless Night Publications
Includes an excerpt from The Sting of Victory
Carmilla and Laura
Copyright © 2018 Endless Night Publications
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permissions, send a query to admin@sdsimper.com.
Cover art by Jerah Moss
ISBN (ebook) 9781732461178
Visit the author at www.sdsimper.com
Facebook: sdsimper
Twitter: @sdsimper
Instagram: sdsimper
For my wife,
who fell asleep when I tried reading the original story to her.
Carmilla and Laura
Foreword
I felt entirely unworthy to write this piece.
Anyone who spends more than five minutes with me knows that I love and adore classic literature. I was that weird girl in high school with her head in some obscure fantasy novel, the first to audition for the lead in a Shakespearean play (Which I did land…twice!), and who happily wrote overly prosy essays on the class system in early 19th century France.
Yet, despite being a literary nerd and a lesbian, I’d somehow missed out on Carmilla. I didn’t read it until after I’d finished college, and I absorbed it all in one sitting (It’s not like it’s a long book). I was obsessed. I researched a thousand and one different dissertations written on the gothic horror novella, researched LeFanu himself, the era, the subversion of tropes, the feminist analysis, the impact on history, etc., etc. . . .
Then I started writing words in my head. The impossible thought of expanding on the original narrative buzzed about in my brain for days. One night, I couldn’t sleep—I just silently recited passages in my head and splattered them out on my metaphorical canvas the next morning: the scene where our leads first kiss on a moonlit night (Who writes linearly? I wish I did.). From there, I wondered if I had the gumption to move forward, to write this literary love letter to a story I care for so dearly.
As I said, I felt unworthy. But here it is—what I hope is a worthy expansion of themes and story arcs with a little added flavor of my own. As much as I hope to entertain my own audience, I also hope to steer them to the original classic and shed some much-deserved light to the original vampire novella.
Go check out the original tale of Carmilla. But in the meantime, I hope you enjoy this one.
Prologue
“At six years of age, I dreamt of my death.”
At midnight, the world sleeps, but airports exist in a pocket of time.
At LAX, Professor Hesselius reads the opening lines of a narrative. She’s en-route to France, preparing to speak to the Historical Preservation Board concerning the documents in her lap. She has gone through most of them, but not all, and the ominous opening line pulls a frown to her face.
Found in a mausoleum within the catacombs of a castle in Austria, the journal baffled the gentleman who dug it out—though it bore an old style of French, within the margin was written a line from Sappho, translated from its native Greek:
Fragment 147, Professor Hesselius recalls, though it had been many years. Its meaning was contested by scholars, but most thought it spoke of yearning, the longing of lovers to be remembered in some distant time. An odd bit of poetry to be written in a journal well over a hundred years old.
A sudden bit of cursing draws the professor’s attention. A man spills coffee onto his pant leg, and she watches him head toward the nearest restroom. She sees a family of six, the youngest screaming, no doubt exhausted at the late hour. An elderly man with a service dog snoozes two seats away, the dog alert and watching the scene with curious eyes.
The professor returns to her literature, when an announcement is made on the intercom: AMS to LAX—DELAYED. A young woman seated in a wheelchair looks up from her copy of Twilight, looking crestfallen at the announcement. She sits across from the professor, her dress antiquated but fashionable, hair done up in the lazy sort of bun college-aged girls tend to prefer, and she bears a ring upon her left-hand forefinger.
It’s a three-hour layover until the plane arrives to take her across the sea. The professor settles in to reread the perilous opener.
***
At six years of age, I dreamt my death.
I found myself sleepless, the chills of night whispering through my window. I knew no fear. I knew no concept of fear, having been raised on narratives of history and pragmaticism, instead of the fairy tales and ghost stories so often told to children. When the wind sang through my window, I thought only of how my governess sang brighter, her voice a lilt upon the breeze.
In my childishness, I hummed along. I realized, then, I was not alone.
I did not know her, yet I longed to. The woman—hardly a woman; her face was so girlish and young, not a day past eighteen—held a visage as luminous as the moon beyond and eyes as dark as the sky itself. She stood by the windowsill, face full of wonder as she looked upon my childish form, dressed in lace and silk. When she caught my eye, her humming ceased. Instead, she stepped forward, arms outstretched.
Not one of her steps made a creak upon the floor. The woman stopped before my bed, and I swore I saw immutable sorrow on her face, her eyes glistening in the dim light. “The time has not yet come,” she whispered, her voice as soft as the moonbeams upon the windowsill.
I knew not of what she spoke, and instead I curled into my sheets. The woman dropped her hands. I sensed her sorrow, felt it down in the depths of my young heart, and longed to wipe her threatened tears. I loved her, though I did not know her.
I beckoned her forward.
In gentle, trepid measures, she crawled in bed beside me. The warmth of her embrace as she engulfed my youthful form stayed with me in dreams for years to come. Wetness stained my blonde locks; her grip tightened as she drew comfort from my presence. She whispered, muffled by the thick waves of my hair, “Darling, darling—how I’ve missed you.”
God spoke of angels coming to watch us in the night. I wondered, in my innocence, if this strange and beautiful specter were one such as they, my own mother, perhaps, she having passed on to heaven when I had scarcely learned to walk. My arms wrapped around her, my face buried in the collar of her dress, and I breathed in the scent of earth upon her skin.
Lips brushed the top of my head. I looked up—
I shrieked at the nightmare. From her eyes stre aked tears of blood, staining her face in ghastly shades of black and red. Fangs peaked from her parted lips. Her embrace, once a comfort, became a cage. I beat against her with my tiny fists, imploring her to release me—
I awoke screaming. Sunlight bathed my room in warmth, birds singing to dampen my cries, but still I screamed until the door burst open. Madam Perrodon rushed in, the ties of her nightgown loose and flowing behind her. “Laura—!” I sobbed into my hands. “Laura!” she cried, and she fell at my bedside, trembling as she attempted to uncover my face. “My child, what has happened?!”
I dared not speak my vision. Great droplets of tears fell from my eyes as she frantically searched my skin for wounds.
And so entered Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, the second of my governesses, and thereafter, my father, roused by my shrieks and those of Perrodon. As the two women attended to me—women I had known since my infancy—my father searched the window and the bed, perhaps seeking signs of intruders.
“There are no marks upon her,” proclaimed De Lafontaine, relief in her voice. “Monsieur, she is not hurt.”
I recalled the specter’s tears, knew they must have stained my bed and hair, but saw nothing, felt nothing. My father sat before me and pulled me into his arms, giving no care that my tears stained the expensive fabrics of his morning coat. “Laura,” he said, and even as a child, I heard his fear, “you are safe now.” He kissed my cheek and held me, protective and tight. “Tell us what you remember.”
And so I told him—of my sleeplessness, of the woman in the night, and of her fangs, her face, stained with blood. I blubbered and sobbed all the while, for I remembered her sorrow and felt it as my own.
“Laura,” he chided, though with kindness on his tongue, “it was a dream. Only a dream.” Then, he turned to Madam Perrodon. “Call the doctor.”
The doctor arrived in the early afternoon. My composure had returned, spurred by my father’s presence and a full stomach. An older man, his white hair hardly a wisp upon his head and with evidence of small pox scars upon his lined face, introduced himself. “I am told you had a scare last night,” he said, kneeling by my bedside. “Laura, will you open your mouth wide for me?”
He inspected my mouth, my throat, my ears, and when there was no evidence of discord, he inspected my skin for superficial wounds, especially my neck. As he did, he asked me to relay my dream, and I told him all, though with fewer hysterics.
“She is healthy,” the doctor told my father, “but may we speak in the hallway a moment?”
Perrodon sat at my bedside as they spoke in the hallway, but she and I both strained to listen when my father suddenly shouted, “Are you mad?”
Whatever the doctor said was drowned beneath my father’s cry of, “Then Baron Vordenburg is mad as well! What you speak of is supernatural!”
He returned shortly and said, “Doctor Spielsburg insists we call the priest.”
When the priest arrived, he smiled and said, “Laura, how you’ve grown!”
I was baptized in my infancy by Father Dubois, or so said my father—I did not recall the man. “Thank you for coming,” my father told him, and once they had greeted the other, Father Dubois came to my bedside.
If I could turn the tables of time, I would have said nothing, or at least shied from the details of what I told myself was all a dream. But children are honest, and I told him all—of the woman and the words she spoke, of her embrace, and of her fangs.
His frown only deepened as the story progressed. Finally, I stopped, apprehensive at his displeasure. “Am I in trouble?”
Immediately, his countenance changed to something merry, forced as it might have been. “No, Laura, no. Dreams are merely that—dreams. Figments of our imagination. Our Lord will not hold us accountable for such.”
I knew it was no dream. When I shut my eyes, I still felt the warm of her embrace, smelled the earthen scent of her skin. But the priest reached out and gently touched my neck as the doctor had done, a curious frown across his face as he inspected my skin. “Madam, will you pull down the child’s collar?”
Perrodon did so, and the doctor kept his scowl as he inspected my collar and chest. “Do you recall any pain? Any sting?”
I shook my head.
He stood and went to my window. From his bag, he produced a metal flask, one that reflected the sun’s light. A few droplets fell to his fingers, and he anointed the water upon the windowsill, sprinkled it upon the ground, and then to the wooden posts of my bed.
“Will you pray with me, Laura?”
I gestured the sign of the cross in tandem with he and my father, who knelt beside Father Dubois. I shut my eyes and heard him speak—words of comfort, words of protection, a blessing for the fearful of heart.
He bid me farewell.
Madam Perrodon insisted upon sleeping on the rocking chair at my bedside that night—“For your comfort, Laura. We would not want you to awaken alone and frightened.”—and so passed an uneventful sleep. No dreams of supernatural visitors; no women in my bed.
I feared her, yet I never forgot her face. It had burned itself into my mind, and though I stopped entertaining the memory in time, even convinced myself it merely had been a figment of my imagination, in the darkest parts of the night I saw her behind my eyelids—her sorrow and her beauty both.
Chapter One
In my nineteenth year, I awoke to a fluttering of excitement in my heart.
The sun had scarcely risen, casting tranquil beams of light across my bed. Birds sang a chorus to chime in the morning, and I sat up, unable to help my radiant smile. For a blissful moment, I simply breathed, content to bask in the calm before the perfect storm, overjoyed to know that my resigned loneliness would come to an end.
A knock at the door disturbed my peace, but it brought no ire. “Come in,” I said, unsurprised when Madam Perrodon entered. Her face was one I had known all my life, though gray had come to streak the bun of her hair. She kept a prim manner of dress, and though the buttons of her bodice stretched at the seams for her weight, her cheery disposition covered all number of flaws.
“I thought you might need some help taming that hair of yours,” Perrodon said, smiling as she sat on the bed beside me. Before I could comment, her expert fingers began untying the many strips of fabric bunched into my hair. It matched the color of the sun, reflecting its light when it fell from her hands. Curls were the style of the times, or so I’d been told—I hadn’t travelled far enough to know.
“Thank you,” I said, making no move to assist her—past experience said I would only irrevocably tangle the blonde curls. “I know it’s a silly thing, but I want to impress her.”
Perrodon’s laugh matched the cadence of the birds outside. “My dear, Mademoiselle Rheinfeldt will adore you no matter how you style your hair.”
“I do hope so,” I replied, transfixed at the foreign feeling of the curled locks. I shook my head, grinning at how they bounced against my cheeks.
Perrodon continued her work, but with each second, anticipation only grew, as though her hurry would make the time pass sooner. Once my hair was freed, she styled it back from my face and tied it loosely with a bow.
I dressed clumsily, fingers trembling from excitement as my governess helped to cinch me into my bodice. “How tight do they keep their corsets in Vienna?”
Oh course, she knew my thoughts. “The mademoiselle will not care how tightly you cinch your corset.” For all her prim proclivities, Perrodon was practical above all else. “No need to suffocate yourself when there are no gentlemen to impress.”
“The general would surely accompany his ward.”
I had no reason to impress General Spielsdorf, given that he was near my father’s age, but Madam Perrodon acquiesced nonetheless.
With each tug on the strings, I swallowed a whine and prayed Perrodon paid no mind to my grimace. It became an internal battle of wills—my desperation for acceptance steadily losing to the panic of shattering my ribs. In the mirror, my waist shrunk by pained degrees, until Perrodon blessedly said, “You’ll scare the mademoiselle if you greet her like this—you look like a ghost, with as white as you’ve turned.”
