At last the revenants became so troublesome the peasants abahe village and it fell solely into the possession of subtle and vindictive inhabitants who maheir presences by shadows that fall almost inperceptibly awry, too many shadows, even at midday, their shadows that have no sour anything visible; by the sound, sometimes, of sobbing in a derelict bedroom where a cracked mirror suspended from a wall does not reflect a presence; by a sense of uhat will afflict the traveller unwise enough to pause to drink from the fountain in the square that still gushes spring water from a faucet stu a stone lions mouth. A cat prowls in a weedy garden; he grins and spits, arches his back, bounces away from an intangible on four fear-stiffened legs. Now all shun the village below the chateau in which the beautiful somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her aral crimes.
Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house uhe eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious aors, eae of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she ts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly struing a stellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into the try of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.
Her voice is filled with distant sonorities, like reverberations in a cave: now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. And she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit. " a bird sing only the song it knows or it learn a new song?" She draws her long, sharp fingernail across the bars of the cage in which her pet lark sings, striking a plawang like that of the plucked heartstrings of a woman of metal. Her hair falls down like tears.
The castle is mostly giveo ghostly octs but she herself has her own suite of drawing room and bedroom. Closely barred shutters and heavy velvet curtains keep out every leak of natural light. There is a round table on a single leg covered with a red plush cloth on which she lays out her iable Tarot; this room is never more than faintly illuminated by a heavily shaded lamp on the mantelpied the dark red figured aper is obscurely, distressingly patterned by the rain that drives in through the ed roof and leaves behind it random areas of staining, ominous marks like those left on the sheets by dead lovers. Depredations of rot and fungus everywhere. The unlit delier is so heavy with dust the individual prisms no longer show any shapes, industrious spiders have woven opies in the ers of this ornate and rotting place, have trapped the porcelain vases on the mantelpie soft grey s. But the mistress of all this disiion notiothing.
She sits in a chair covered in med burgundy velvet at the low, round table and distributes the cards; sometimes the lark sings, but more often remains a sullen mound of drab feathers. Sometimes the tess will wake it for a brief za by strumming the bars of its cage; she likes to hear it announce how it ot escape.
She rises when the sus and goes immediately to her table where she plays her game of patieil she grows hungry, until she bees ravenous. She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those toug imperfe