Carmilla: Moonlight's Guide to Nocturnal Creatures

CHAPTER 4: TO DEVOUR OR TO BE DEVOURED

"In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined."-Thomas Szasz

"No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice." - Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

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It's time to go this is not home
Many other broken traces have been lost
You're reaching many fallen
Declines throughout this road
Hearing out the voices
Of sadness from your heart
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So how this isn't the way for me
To let you go
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No you're not finding some other ways
To let me go
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Now
This is not home
"Slow Decline" -Elsiane
(Featured from Carmilla's Tumblr heycarmilla.tumblr.com)

CHAPTER 4

Present day...

Reverberations exceeded in between the glass paneling. Howls excited the leaves, while I gazed inattentively across the canopy. My thoughts were on something else, but the forest's impeddingness, made me resort back to reality. They had come out of nowhere. Why was I questioning things so swiftly? The yellows swivels of life of the black beast that had peered at me so inquisitively made me question myself just as much. It was like falling in a deep, abyss of water, gradually falling to the bottom. I never reached the bed of sand though, because the fall was short lived thanks to my father.

"Are you ok?" I jolted in my seat. His hand was on my shoulder and the grasp was gentle, but it felt tightly gripped. The grasp seemed to reach within my foggy mind and pulled me back.

"Yeah." I shook my head for focus. "Yeah, sorry I was sort of daydreaming." That wasn't it at all. I had had this feeling of euphoria, about all of this, moving and going off to school, but now I felt different.

Black as night and wakeful as day, the large cat, wasn't something I was unaccustomed to seeing so entirely. I my have not seen such a wild animal so full of ominousity, but I have seen the dark voids of the deepest depths within the forest. They don't speak a direct language, but it's linguality was something you just heard. Just as much as I was hearing it now. Soft spoken words in the air as the wind whisks between your ears. Sneaking and slithering things, hiding and hunting. The virtues of true life.

From my many camping trips I have taken or from my growing desires of the primitive life, I've observed one true rule. Animals had a life force that drove them to one meaning of existence. To eat or to be eaten. And here I was worried about the futile attempts of college.

It was almost comical. Maybe that was why I suddenly got lost in my thoughts. There were things that didn't seem like they were getting answered anytime soon, but why did I worry? Life didn't hand over lemons with them fully cleaned and cut up properly...unless you went to a grocery store and bought them like that or something, but that's besides the point. I am overthinking things. Right? Some things happened simply because they could. I was here, because I just was. The animal had probably just made me paranoid.

The brochures were strange. I will admit. Incentives were directed towards things I specifically endeared. How does that seem plausible towards coincidence. 'As coincidence would have it...' the popular phrase spoken from my father's lips when he would try to avert my curiosity. The forest has shown me many  unexplainable things. Things that no one would believe, but he had still refused to believe me. I was beginning to agree. But now...I'm not so sure. The panther...