...
between-fear-and-knowledge
Decima
There's a lot - not so many in the earlier years, most of which have their subject only distantly.
The 1861 set - a smattering of records about one Illamarc Kyteler. One newspaper clipping - with a street photo and in the background of that, only barely recognizable - a woman with Carmilla's bearing and hair. No other pictures of her, though there are obituaries and records and tombstone photographs of the women who died, a far more comprehensive record than the forum-goers have been able to put together this far back, including of another three women who slowly sickened and died. Illamarc appears in the records for more than a year - she seems to show up a year before the spree begins, and vanishes after the death of the last of the three lingering deaths - months after the last violent killing.
1874 - records about one Lamilcra Fisher. She's present for the same time frame around the sprees as Illamarc, and there's a few more pictures of her. Only one set doesn't have her at a distance. She's standing with another woman, one whose figure is gaunt but who bears a wan smile, and Lamilcra looks worried and uneasy - and the woman in the picture with her has an obituary dated a month later, her death due to a wasting illness. There's other pictures from that same sitting - Lamilcra's smiling in only one of them, in baffled delight at her companion. (There's only the one lingering death this time, but more violent deaths.)
1887 - records about one Callmira Bender, though when Dani tries to search her name she gets results asking her if she meant Elvira Bender, a member of a family of serial killers from the mid-1800s. More pictures, more scattered - Callmira doesn't seem to have intentionally sat for any - and four lingering deaths, far fewer violent deaths.
1900 - Carlalim Zwanziger. She was a garment factory worker for a time, and the main identifiable picture is of her with several other workers. (And two of those are later recorded as a lingering death.) And in the newspaper clippings - a middle-aged woman who claims to have seen the spirit of her friend Lamilcra who vanished twenty six years before, and the spirit hadn't aged a day. (This, too, is when the black cat nightmare is first recorded - one of the two lingering deaths spoke about it in her letters.)
And a parade after, every thirteen years, pictures and records becoming ever more thorough, more easily verified. And several of the odder last names - if Dani looks them up, they're associated with a famous female serial killer. (If she looks up a list of female serial killers, they all are - right up to Bathory.) (And Dani's own dream of the black cat happened during the previous spree, in 2004 - Millarca Gunness that year, and there were three victims with lingering deaths - )
There's patterns beyond that. Her first name always contains the same letters. The more lingering deaths there are in a spree, the fewer violent deaths - disproportionately so, though never by a consistent amount. No years have zero lingering deaths - and the Carmilla-alike each time is an associate of every one of them - and the years with only one are often followed by years with four or more.
And just about all of it can be verified. The Carmilla-alikes are associated with the university decently often, though not always in ways that get their picture posted somewhere public. (Though Allamric Vermilya, 1991, was part of one of the sports teams and has her picture in a crowded trophy case.)
There's a lot.
