Chapter Text
The story is all over the news. Playboy William Karnstein, up and coming mogul and heir to the Karnstein empire, wiped out his sports car under the influence and died in a ball of flames.
It’s exactly the kind of story journalists lose their minds over. There’s the usual frenzy over anything the elite do, whipped to boiling point because Will was young and handsome and something of a player. But there’s also the business angle, what will happen to the Karnstein businesses, that let the usually more conservative papers dip their fingers into the salacious bullshit.
That’s enough for the journalists to lose their minds over, but you add in the fact that he crashed the car into the front of the family house and killed his mother in the process, and the story is all over the papers for months. It’s fed by speculation about the future of Karnstein Industries and the sole remaining Karnstein. Pretty Carmilla Karnstein is rumored to have seen the crash that killed her mother and brother, although the lawyers are quick to issue a statement stating she was away at boarding school at the time. They ask for privacy, but her face shows up in photo after photo, long angle lenses capturing her pain and distributing it worldwide.
You know all of this because you read the papers religiously. One day you’re going to be a journalist, and you’re going to do better than this.
College isn’t entirely what you expect, and it’s not just the lack of a movie montage of the day your Dad helps move you in. Contrary to expectation, you don’t have a roommate. Your Dad only shrugs when you ask him about it, but you’re in an older building that is usually reserved for second and third year students, and the rooms are all singles.
You figure he thought this way you might go to fewer parties or get into less trouble. And maybe he’s right on that, but you do attend your fair share of parties and meet your share of pretty ladies. You also have a full load of classes and more schoolwork than seems reasonable, and you get a little overwhelmed at first. You have several classes and new friends and a lot of invitations, and you struggle to switch codes so fast and so often, and things get maybe a little out of control after the first month or so.
When you get two Bs and a C on your first papers, you figure you have to work out how to use your time better. And so you stop all the focus shifting, stop trying to do four or five things a day, stop trying to socialise and attend class and write papers and eat well. Instead you start to do things when you have the energy and focus, whenever that happens to be. You move into a new pattern where you binge study, you binge parties, and you binge sleep. You attend all the classes that you can, but your emphasis moves more and more to your readings and papers, because you can do those any time of day or night. And hey, if you’re struggling to understand a particular concept, you do have a pretty good relationship with your Lit TA.
Keepings things ticking along properly takes most of your time and focus. And you’re so wrapped up in it all that strange things happening around you, even the truly bizarre, don’t always register. Danny talks about her lecturer having horns, and you laugh because you think she’s being figurative. Your new friend LaFontaine says they’ve found a former librarian trapped on a USB key, and you raise your eyebrows a little, but hey, information technology is improving all the time, right? Then the campus is infested with giant mushrooms, and you were sleeping at the time, but the number of people allegedly missing from the Drama Club suggests maybe it was as bad as people are saying.
You nod along to the stories, doubting their veracity, but just trying to keep your head above water. You have new friends and new hobbies and a lot of new things to read. You don’t have time to go chasing down every rumour, even if some of them would make truly excellent fodder for your journalism class.
In all of this, that you don’t even meet your closest neighbour for months doesn’t register on your personal scale of kooky. In fact, you don’t even notice that you haven’t met her until the first time you see her door actually open.
Honestly, you don’t really see her. Not unless a blur of dark movement counts; the door was closing right as you went out. And you’re startled, but mostly because you hadn’t realised anyone lived there at all. That you’ve never seen her means literally nothing; your hours are so irregular now that you sometimes don’t see other people for days at a time, but you’ve also never heard her. And she’s right on the other side of your wall.
You pause outside her door, wondering if you should knock, say hello. But just because you didn’t know she was there, doesn’t mean she didn’t know about you (and you wince a bit, thinking about some of the hours at which you know you’ve been playing Lorde too loudly). She definitely knows about you.
If she wanted to say hi, you reason, she would have already. She’s had the opportunity. That she hasn’t means she doesn’t want to, and so you step back from the door and progress to your Lit class. You’re already late, and you haven’t been in a week and Danny is bugging you.
After that, you pay a little more attention, and you try to keep your music down. It doesn’t always work - writing a history essay at three am essentially requires that you play Taylor Swift to keep your brain functioning - but you try.
You listen for her.
And you don’t hear anything. Not for ages. She’s so quiet that for a while, you think maybe you imagined the whole thing. That you never saw a door close, that the room was and continues to be empty.
Danny quickly quashes that theory for you. “Single rooms don’t stay empty, trust me. They make a bunch of money for the university, they would never just leave one empty.” She paused, looking at the bite of pie on her fork, then put it down. “I didn’t manage to get a single til second year, and someone told me it only became available because the previous owner started raving about bright lights and gods at exam time. They basically changed the sheets and moved me in.”
You had raised your eyebrows, wondering again how your father had managed to get you a single as a first year. But Danny had asked you about your progress on your Wuthering Heights essay, and you’d let the subject go.
But you keep listening, and sometimes, yeah, you do hear her. Not music or tv, like comes from most of your neighbor’s rooms, but her.
Typing is basically the most specific of all sounds, so it shouldn’t be surprising that that’s the first sound you recognise as definitely coming from her. It startles you a bit, and you’re not sure why. She lives in the Silas student housing, so obviously she’s a student - she has papers to write, and she has to study.
But once you have that, it’s easier to pick out her other sounds. And they’re little, mostly - the hinges of a fridge, the click of a closing drawer. Running water, from the shower or the sink. And footsteps.
She walks softly, her footfall so soft it’s hard to pick out at all. You wonder if her room, unlike yours, is carpeted, because once you recognise her footsteps they’re very frequent but somehow still very light. As far as you can tell, she walks about throughout most of the day, because almost any time you concentrate, you hear her.
She’s pacing, you realise gradually. She paces about inside and she never seems to leave.
It becomes the most distinctive of her sounds.
Danny at first thinks you’re imagining the whole thing, then finds it deeply creepy. Maybe it’s because of how she got her first single room, but once she realises your housemate never comes out, she seems halfway convinced the girl is on the edge of a homicidal rampage.
“I mean, normal people don’t stay inside all day, every day. How can she even keep passing her classes?” She wonders aloud, and you shrug.
“Probably there are electives with minimal facetime. Or maybe I’m wrong and she has tutorials at five in the morning, I’m not always awake.” You say.
Danny laughs. “Yes you are, Hollis,” she says. “I have gotten far too many crack of horrible o'clock texts from you to not know that.”
Yes, but. “Yeah, but not every day,” you argue, and now you’re confused because originally you were the one convincing her that your neighbor never goes out.
Danny pulls a face, then she shrugs. “I don’t know, Laura, but if you’re right and she never goes out at all, then maybe you should be careful if you ever do see her around. It might mean she’s finally cracked.”
You wince a little, and hope like hell that whoever your neighbor is, she isn’t listening.
School gets busy for a while, and you have less time to see Danny, and less time to ponder the girl on the other side of the wall. You don’t do parties for a couple of weeks, studying and sleeping and studying more, and churning out papers at a rate you find either depressing or impressive, depending on how many hours it’s been since you last saw food.
It does make you wonder how your neighbor manages to eat. The cooking facilities in your rooms are lacking at best, and while you can about make yourself instant noodles or cocoa, you’d end up with scurvy if you didn’t eat at the campus outlets or order in a dozen times a week. You’re currently living off cookies and grape soda, with an occasional option on pizza when your weekly stipend comes through. If your housemate isn’t doing the same, she either has the world’s biggest stash of trail mix in there, or she’s a vampire.
When you do finally see Danny, it ends up answering a few questions. When the worst of your deadlines pass, you go over to hers for a Netflix session that ends with you making out on her bed for at least half of it. You also fall asleep through a solid proportion of Battlestar Galactica, and Danny lets you sleep through the miniseries before rousing you and insisting on walking you home.
She kisses you at the front door, sweet and chivalrous and clearly trying to not pressure you by kissing you at the door to your room or asking for an invite upstairs. You appreciate that enough that you spend a fair bit more time kissing than either of you planned, and you’re shivering by the time she smoothes your hair back and kisses your cheek before she leaves.
You go upstairs, fumbling through your pockets for your key and hoping like hell you didn’t lose it somewhere in Danny’s sheets. You’re so intent on finding your key and not freezing to death that you all but trip over three boxes in the corridor.
“Hell and Hogwarts,” you swear, narrowly catching yourself on the opposite wall. It stings your hand, and you’re ready to kick a box in sheer pique, when you realise where they are.
It’s two on a Wednesday morning, and there’s three boxes stacked outside your invisible neighbor’s door. Delivery boxes from - you peer a little closer - a grocery chain you didn’t think was even in this town.
So. Your mysterious housemate does exist, and does eat, and can apparently get people to deliver her food at frankly bizarre hours of the morning.
You squint, thinking. Does this contribute or detract from the vampire theory?
If you were clever, or a bit more committed, or frankly just less freaking tired, you’d probably use this opportunity to stake out her door and see her actual face. Instead you finally pull your key out of your pocket and fumble it into your lock, before staggering towards the bathroom and your bed.
You’re in your pyjamas and about to settle down when you see the eight packets of cookies still stacked beside your desk. You weren’t kidding about living on those; one night you’d found a box of your favourites on special from Amazon and had hit the ‘one click buy’ faster than you could think about your credit card statement. They’d been amazing for your first four essays, but you think you’ve finally discovered the point at which one overdoses on chocolatey goodness. And the walnuts keep sticking in your teeth.
For once, you don’t overthink it. You just grab two packets, jam your feet into your owl slippers, and trudge next door. You balance the containers of deliciousness on top of the boxes, and then do a double take and re-read the name on the address label.
C. Karnstein.
Oh.
Okay, so.
You know there were rumors, a while back, that Carmilla Karnstein had left town and gone to rehab. Well, gone or been committed forcefully, speculated the papers; chatter about the life of the sole surviving Karnstein clearly moved editions, whether or not it had any basis in truth. Probably university was too mainstream to sell papers.
On reflection, there were also on-campus rumours that Carmilla Karnstein was attending your school, but since it was mentioned in the same breath as the mermaids in the lake and the tolling of the faery bells, you didn’t think anyone was serious about it.
Maybe they weren’t, though. Your neighbor is super quiet and super private, and it seems pretty unlikely she’s been abducting first years during social events. Plus, you’re pretty confident that if she was stashing a harem of women in her one bedroom apartment, you would not have needed to doubt her existence.
Rumors are notoriously inaccurate, but it seems like it’s just a bizarre coincidence that Carmilla Karnstein is exactly where campus rumor claims. You’re her closest neighbor, and you have literally never seen her. The chances that the Alchemy Club have some kind of inside knowledge on her activities are vanishingly small.
None of this stops you from casually initiating conversations with anyone you’ve ever heard make any mention of Carmilla.
You confirm quickly that the Alchemy club knows literally nothing about Carmilla Karnstein except what was in the papers: that she’s gay, pretty, and mysterious. You already knew all of that, and keep looking.
Naturally, she isn’t a member of any other clubs. There is no evidence she’s ever been to any of the clubs where she apparently kidnaps nubile young women (and there are no women reported missing). You don’t have access to class lists, so you start scanning group assignment lists and message boards in case you see her name. You check the message boards in your apartment block in case her name comes up. You get nowhere.
Your many and varied efforts get you such a comprehensive lack of results, you even contemplate asking your RA Perry for the student list for the block, just to see if C Karnstein appears on it. You’ve halfway talked yourself into doing it, when you witness Perry terrorizing a senior for microwaving something without a lid. And yeah, no. Probably there are better ways of confirming that one Ms Karnstein attends your school.
And eventually you stumble into one.
You’re in the library around sunset, trying to borrow books for your philosophy elective, but you’re struggling. It seems like every book you could possibly use for your topic has been loaned out, and many of them are weeks and weeks overdue. This is despite the frankly punitive system of fines you know the library issues for overdue books, starting at ten dollars a day and graduating to cell samples.
But you need at least one reference, even if the sun is going down and the librarians are all starting to look even twitchier than usual. So you wander over to the main loans desk, and ask an assistant for help trying to find something relevant to your topic. You tell him the topic, and he nods and starts typing into the search window on his laptop.
He adjusts his glasses when the computer beeps, and peers at the screen. It won’t stop scrolling on its own, and he has to keep pulling back up to the top of the page, but even so, you see the lines of red after every book on the screen.
“I’m sorry, Ms Hollis, it seems like none of the books are available at this time,” he says primly after a moment.
You scowl. “How can none of them be available? Like seriously, all of them are gone? Every single book on determinism has been taken out at one time? No one else in my class is even using this topic.” You lean over the desk, trying to get a quick glance at the screen, and he pulls it away from you. Okay, fair enough, privacy and all that, but - “Doesn’t a red date mean the book is overdue? How can they ALL be overdue?”
His nose twitches, and he takes a deep breath. “It appears that all of the books on determinism are on loan at this time.” he says tightly. “We of course do our best to have late books returned, however it is not always possible to achieve this within a reasonable timeframe.”
The main door slams, and you both jump, the assistant making an oddly goat-like hiccup as he does so. He looks frantically at his watch and then out at the sun, before turning back to you. “I’m sorry, Ms Hollis, we won’t be able to find you anything this evening.”
And he flicks down the lid of his laptop and trots off, not even waiting for you to reply. You might imagine it, but you think you see him drop to all fours as he rounds the nearest shelves.
He’s put the computer lid down, presumably putting it to sleep. But you really do need a book, so you don’t think too much before pulling it towards you. Maybe if you just find out who has all the books - if there’s anyone in your class you can maybe borrow one from - you can get a book for long enough to write your damn paper.
You pull the lid up, and the screen shows the computer is shutting down. But the search window is still visible, and when you glance at the list of borrower’s names, the name you’ve been searching for leaps out at you.
Carmilla Karnstein apparently has an extensive interest in determinism.
You tell all of this to Danny one night. You’re cuddling in her bed - the summer society rooms actually contain doubles, which you’d be more bitter about if the members of the summer society weren’t uniformly at least a foot taller than you - and talking quietly about what’s kept you so busy lately.
She hears you out, lets you describe how you’d accidentally found out your neighbor’s identity and then run all over the campus trying to get some kind of confirmation that Carmilla Karnstein actually attends your university. You keep back the details on how it’s been cutting into your course load, and you’ve missed a couple days sleep again. Danny has a tendency to worry, and she’s been a little overly concerned about your schedule.
When you get to the part about Perry, she laughs. But she doesn’t like you being in the library to begin with, and when you tell her how you’d gotten to see Carmilla’s name on the library files, she’s straight-out disapproving.
“I mean, I understand wanting to get a book for your assignment, but seriously Laura, you went out of your way to breach people’s privacy. And you know being in the library after sundown is all but inviting something horrible to happen.”
You squirm a little, knowing Danny is right. And yet. “But I also finally managed to confirm Carmilla - THE Carmilla Karnstein - goes here. And is my neighbor. That’s a pretty big deal, right?”
She rolls her eyes, and rolls onto her back. You’re still pressed into her side, and you cuddle a little more into her. “Yeah, but if you’d just asked me, I could have told you that.” She says, and your head comes off her shoulder on automatic.
You climb a little more on top of her, your stomach now against hers so you can see her face. “I’m sorry, you knew Carmilla Karnstein goes here?”
She pulls a face, skin between her eyebrows wrinkling. “Yeah, I mean I didn’t know she was your roommate, but I knew she went here.”
You’re reeling. “Danny, seriously, how?!”
She shrugs a little. “All the arts TAs share a staffroom. She’s in my friend Mel’s philosophy tutorial. Apparently has never come to class but submits all of her essays online, which is also against policy, you know.”
“I know,” you say distractedly. You’d missed handing in a hard copy of an assignment once, and the warning notification you’d gotten from the Dean ensured this was not something you were going to be doing again any time soon, even if you weren’t sure what an elven wolf even was. “Jeez, how did I not know about this?”
Danny shrugs again, but this time she seems more tense. She sits up a bit, leaning more against her pillows, and you have to pull away to keep upright.
“I don’t know, it never came up. It’s not something I’m that interested in - she isn’t,” she specifies after a moment.
You don’t get it. “How can you not be interested? She was all over the papers for years and now she just mysteriously shows up here and you don’t care?”
“I’m just not,” she says shortly. She sees the look on your face and expands, “I’m not a journalist, Laura, I’m a literature major. I wasn’t that interested in the scandal and I don’t really care what some poor little rich girl is doing locked away in her dorm instead of attending classes like the rest of us plebs.”
Whoa. “That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?” You ask a little helplessly.
She simmers down a bit at your tone, sitting back. “I don’t know, it honestly isn’t something I spend much time thinking about. Mostly I just think it’s creepy she hides away in there and doesn’t talk to anyone like an extra from We have always lived in the castle.”
On Danny’s suggestion, you’d read that a month ago as an additional text for your lit class, so you get the reference. You’re horrified. “Jesus, Danny, she’s not the one who killed her family!”
“That we know about,” she says darkly, and she won’t talk about Carmilla with you any more.
Probably it’s just that you know she’s there now. And certainly, now you listen out for her. But it also seems like she’s louder now, somehow freer to make noise.
Well, not that she’s ever loud, per se. It’s more that, now you know for sure she’s there, you’re more able to link the occasional night time sound to her, and to try to figure out how that links into her life overall.
She types a lot, more than you’d noticed before, and you figure it’s just that yeah, even she is affected by the time of semester. She’s got papers to write and reading summaries to submit, even if she doesn’t attend the actual classes she should be doing the readings for.
She also seems to feel real vehemence about those classes and their attendance requirements. Or at least, it’s the first time you hear her absolutely-for-certain say something that you can both hear and are sure is her.
Because she does talk to herself, softly, when she thinks you’re not around. At first you assume she’s on the phone, but gradually you realise that the conversations are too spread out, end without any resolution, and are at all hours of the night. She’s talking to herself, probably without realising she’s doing it.
Over a couple of weeks, you notice it more and more, maybe because the both of you are sleeping less as mid session exams approach. You think that possibly the university is taking the opportunity to put some pressure on her over the classes she doesn’t attend, because that’s the first thing you specifically hear her say - “For God’s sake, like i need the opinions of a roomful of teenaged dimwits to help educate me.”
You’re writing an essay on ethics in journalism, but your head comes up at the first word, and you laugh without meaning to. Unfortunately, it means she immediately goes silent.
You want to put a hand to the wall and apologise. Tell her, quietly, that she doesn’t need to hide her presence for your sake. But you can’t quite find the nerve, so you go back to typing up and deleting chunks of your essay in bursts.
Eventually, you hear her moving around her room again. She doesn’t speak again that evening.
You realise after a while that some of what you think is her being deliberately silent is in fact her sleeping. She sleeps a lot more than you, not that that’s saying something - your sleep patterns have gone from erratic to completely insane with all of your due dates, and Danny would have a fit if she knew how much of your lit essay was written between three and six am.
But Carmilla, she sleeps a lot, and she particularly sleeps a lot during the day. Sure it’s university, but she doesn’t attend the parties that are responsible for most students shifting their sleep patterns to those of the undead. Carmilla just wanders her room, pacing about or reading, til the wee hours of the morning, and then lies in bed sometimes until lunch time.
You can hear her breathing, and sometimes you’re sure she’s not sleeping. You figured out after a month or so of listening to her that her apartment is like a mirror of yours, her bed just the other side of the wall from yours. Some nights, when you’re too revved to sleep or just too overwhelmed by everything that is Silas, you sit and listen to her breathing.
(If you told this to Danny, she’d probably think you’re the one creepy enough to belong in a Shirley Jackson novel).
You pay attention, and eventually you think you know her breathing well enough to tell when she’s asleep, and when she’s just lying there very, very quietly.
You think if your whole family had died, you wouldn’t have much to say either.