Carmilla

"Sssssooooo cooollllld..d..d-d..."

Don't walk the halls alone.

Don't turn out the lights.

Don't play games or take dares with her name.

Don't. Don't. Don't. Don-

"But now you're herrrrrreeee and I'm warm ininininside."

She's just a story. Keep telling yourself that when you feel her watching waiting so patient always there in the corner in the hall waiting wanting hungry when you're all alone. A made-up ghost story, an urban legend. Carmilla Zanthees, horribly slain for the age old crime of being different....

Lovely, sixteen, a model student; her only flaw was a shy and withdrawn personality. She made few friends, wouldn't date, even resisted changing where anyone could see her. She was happy enough, but her oddities made her a curiosity, an object of teasing and rumors. Scars, birthmarks, deformities, people said all kinds of things. Eventually, for several members of the football team and their girlfriends, drunk from a party and out late, curiosity and cruelty won out. They tracked her down. They knocked on her door. They bullied her into coming out with them, putting on a show of smiles and laughter for her parents. Oh look she has some friends from school how nice how wonderful she'll have a good time. They drove her to a local park. They tried asking some direct questions. They made unkind guesses. They wheedled and poked and demanded. They started shoving. They yanked at her clothes. They grabbed her. They felt her.

For all her curves, her lovely face, her ample breasts...she had a penis. A not unimpressive shaft and testicles. There were no apparent female organs. She was a he, but a she, female in every way but the most technical one. Disgust shock confusion hate hate hate hate. Carmilla insisted she was born this way. It was the result of nature, not surgery, and couldn't they understand? This was why she was so nervous, why she stayed apart from everyone!

One of them hit her. Another kicked her while she was down. One of them had a knife, and then there was only agony, sharp lines of pain wherever it touched. They sliced and sliced, and ruined her pretty face, and meant to hurt her. They might not have meant to kill her, but they cut too deeply on her inner thigh and her life gushed out down her leg, soaking her skirt. She whimpered as she died, her killers running away in fear of legal reprisal.

And she never, ever forgave.

As the legend has it, Carmilla's body was not recovered. The blood was there, a few scraps of cloth, the flattened grass. But without the forensic evidence of the body, there was little to link the murderers to the crime. As it turned out, it didn't matter. Justice came about all on its own. It came in the dark. It came when they were alone or in pairs. She came for them, one by one, and they too were never found. Oh, but she was angry. Her fury was not sated by their poor souls alone! There have been mysterious disappearances ever since that night, usually but not always teenagers. Many are not attributed to the legend of Carmilla Zanthees, yet for some there is no plausible explanation. A preening yuppie daughter who vanished, screaming, from inside a locked bathroom. A child there when his mother turned out the light, and gone five seconds later when she heard a noise and flicked it back on. Things like that.

Most often when she appears, she looks as she did when she died. With an effort she can look like she did while she was alive, but this is only a ruse, to lure the unsuspecting. Of average height, she stands five and a half feet. Her hair is long and dark, held back by a simple barrette. Her clothes and skin are marked by a horrendous number of thin, shallow cuts that look slightly bruised...as well as the deeper one inside her thigh and the large bloody stain on her skirt. Her cheeks have been sliced open in a Glasgow smile, making her mouth abnormally wide and flexible. Her eyes, when open, are black as pitch and glossy, almost reflective.

Don't look behind



"Ring around the rosy.
Pocket full of posies.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Ring around the rosy.
What do you suppose we
Can do to fight the darkness
In which we drown?

Ring around the rosy.
This evil thing, it knows me.
Lost ghosts surround me...
I can't fall down."


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