Original subtitles

hello and welcome back to quarantine

story time with me natasha negovanlis

reading joseph sheridan le fanu's gothic

vampire novella carmilla

we are now on to the final chapter

chapter 16 conclusion

i'm very sad i'm very sad that

carmilla's dead dead dead double dead i

guess she was dead already but

anyway i write all this you suppose with

composure

but far from it i cannot think of it

without agitation

nothing but your earnest desires so

repeatedly expressed could have induced

me to sit

down to write a task that has unstrung

my nerves for months to come

and reintroduced a shadow of the

unspeakable horror which

years after my deliverance continued to

make my days and nights dreadful

and solitude insupportably terrific

let me add a word or two about that

quaint baron vordenberg

to whose curious lore we were indebted

for the discovery of

countess mercallah's grave he had taken

up his abode in gratz where living upon

a mere pittance which was all that

remained to him of the once princely

estates of his family in upper styria

he devoted himself to the minute and

laborous investigation of the

marvelously authenticated tradition of

vampirism

he had at his fingers and all the great

and little works upon the subject

philosophical

you know there's just a lot of latin by

john christopher

herrenberg and a thousand others

among which i remember only a few of

those which he lent to my father

he had a voluminous digest of all the

judicial cases from which he had

extracted a system of principles

that appear to govern some always and

others

occasionally only the condition of the

vampire

i may mention in passing that the deadly

power attributed to

that sort of revenants is a mere

melodramatic fiction

they present in the grave and when they

show themselves in human society the

appearance

of healthy life when disclosed to light

in their coffins they exhibit all the

symptoms that are

enumerated as those which proved the

vampire life of the long dead countess

karnstein

how they escape from their graves and

return to them for certain hours every

day without displacing the clay

or leaving any trace of disturbance in

the state of the coffin

or the ceremonies has always been

admitted to be utterly inexplicable

the amphibious existence of the vampire

is sustained by

daily renewed slumber in the grave its

horrible lust for living blood supplies

the vigor of its waking existence

the vampire is prone to be fascinated

with an engrossing vehemence resembling

the passion of love by particular

persons

in pursuit of these it will exercise

inexhaustible patience and

stratagem for access to a particular

object may be obstructed in a hundred

ways

it will never desist until it has

satiated its passion

and drained the very life of its coveted

victim

but it will in these cases husband

and protract its murderous enjoyment

with the refinement

of an epicure and heightened it by

gradual approaches

of an artful courtship in these cases it

seems to yearn for something like

sympathy and consent in ordinary ones it

goes direct to its object overpowers

with violence

and strangles and exhausts often at a

single feast

the vampire is apparently subject

in certain situations to special

conditions

in the particular instance of which i

have given you a relation

mercalla seemed to be limited to a name

which

if not her real one should at least

reproduce without the omission or

addition of a single letter

those as we say and grammatically which

compose it

carmilla did this so did malarka

my father related to the baron

vordenberg who remained with us for two

or three weeks after the expulsion of

carmilla

the story about the morovian nobleman

and the vampire at karnstein churchyard

and then he asked the baron how he had

discovered the exact position of the

long concealed tomb of the countess

mercalla

the baron's grotesque features puckered

up into a mysterious smile

he looked down still smiling on his worn

spectacle case

and fumbled with it then looking up he

said

i have many journals and other papers

written by that remarkable man

the most curious among them is the one

treating of the visit of which you speak

to karnstein

the tradition of course discolours and

distorts a little

he might have been termed a morovian

nobleman

for he had changed his abode to that

territory and

was beside a noble but he was in truth

the native of upper styria

it is enough to say that in very early

youth he had

been a passionate and favored lover of

the beautiful mercalla

countess karnstein her early death

plunged him

into inconsolable grief it is the nature

of vampires to increase and multiply but

according to

an ascertained and ghostly law assume

at starting a territory perfectly free

from that pest

how does it begin and how does it

multiply itself

i will tell you a person more or less

wicked puts an end to himself

a suicide under a certain circumstances

becomes a vampire

that specter visits living people in

their slumbers they die

and almost invariably in the grave

develop into vampires

this happened in the case of the

beautiful mercalla who

was haunted by one of those demons my

ancestor vordenberg whose title i still

bear

soon discovered this and in the course

of the studies to which he devoted

himself to learned a great deal

more among other things he concluded

that suspicion of vampirism would

probably fall sooner or later upon the

dead countess

who in life had been his idol he

conceived a horror

be she what

be she what she might that's the

sentence

he conceived horror be she what she

might of her remains being profaned by

the outrage of a posthumous

execution he has left a curious paper

to prove that the vampire on its

expulsion from its

amphibious existence is projected

into a far more horrible life

and he resolved to save his once beloved

makala from this

he adopted the stratagem of a journey

here and pretended

removal of her remains and real

obliteration of

her monument when age had stolen upon

him

and from the veil of years he looked

back on the scenes he was leaving he

considered in a different spirit

what he had done and a horror took

possession of him

he made the tracings and notes which

have guided me to the very spot

and drew up a confession of the

deception that he had practiced

if he had intended any further action

in this matter death prevented him and

in the hand

of a remote descendant has too late for

many directed the pursuit

to the lair of the beast we talked a

little more and among other things

he said was this one sign of the vampire

is the power of the hand the slender

hand of

mercalla closed like a vice of steel on

the general's wrist when he raised the

hatchet to strike

but its power is not confined to its

grasp

it leaves a numbness in the limbs it

seizes which is

slowly if ever recovered from the

following spring my father took me a

tour

through italy we remained away for more

than a year

it was long before the terror of recent

events subsided

and to this hour the image of carmilla

returns to memory with

ambiguous alterations sometimes the

playful

languid beautiful girl sometimes the

writhing fiend i saw in the ruined

church

and often from a reverie i have started

fancying

i heard the light step of carmilla

at the drawing room door that's

it the end

that's the book i dare say i like

our retelling much better but thank you

so much for

listening and for watching and for

following us

on this journey i can't believe it's

been six years

and i hope that you all enjoyed this

story time