Chantal and Zelda

This article is about Chantal and Zelda from the comic series. You may be looking for Chantal and Zelda from the Netflix adaptation.

Chantal and Zelda
Biographical information
Species	Human
Status	Deceased
Cause of Death	AIDS
Origin
First appearance	The Sandman #11 The Doll's House #3: Moving In
Last appearance	The Sandman #61, The Kindly Ones, Part 5 (Only Zelda)
Portrayal(s)	Daisy Badger (Chantal, TV series) Cara Horgan (Zelda, TV series)

Chantal and Zelda were a couple that lived in Hal Carter's house in Cocoa, Florida.

History

When Zelda was a little girl, growing up with her father Robert and an unnamed mother, she was fascinated by the morbid aesthetic of graveyards, skulls and spiders. Her mother called her sick and disgusting. Zelda was scared of her mother, but at some point she met Chantal and recognized her as her "soul sister". However, they approached their shared interest differently: Chantal loved the graveyard aesthetic for itself and didn't believe in God, while Zelda loved those things "because they showed transience".

By the time Rose Walker moved into Hal's house, Chantal and Zelda had been living there for two years. They had a habit of always wearing white dresses with veils and took pride in having collected "the largest collection of stuffed spiders in private hands on the Eastern seaboard", claiming it comprised over 24,000 specimens, which earned them the nickname "Spider Women". Zelda always kept silent because she was conscious about her stutter, and Chantal had an unusually elaborate manner of speech. They are shown to be a couple, but due to their reserved demeanor, other tenants weren't sure about the exact nature of their relationship.

When the Vortex started influencing people's dreams, Chantal and Zelda were affected by this along with the rest of the tenants. Chantal was shown to have a rather literary dream in which she first fell in love with a sentence, and then got trapped in a recursive story. Zelda dreamt herself to be a little girl, wandering around a graveyard and remembering her mother yelling at her. After being dragged into Chantal's dream, Zelda began telling her the ghost story Lost Hearts to break her out of the loop. When Morpheus intervened to contain the vortex, both woke up, scared and lonely, and held each other until dawn.

About six months later, when Hal decided to sell his house and move out, Zelda and Chantal bought it from him, and he was surprised to find out that Zelda gathered enough courage to start speaking. However, in the following years they had a falling out with Hal for an unknown reason.

In April 1989, Chantal had a kidney replacement. Unfortunately, the donor - an unknown woman killed in a shooting - wasn't checked properly, and the transplant turned out to be HIV positive. Chantal died at some point within the next years, and Zelda, too, got the virus from her. 4 years after the events of The Doll's House, Zelda was admitted to a hospice in L.A., and Rose came there to look after her and pay her medical bills. At one point in her dreams she received a message from a deceased Unity, asking Rose to return to her house to get back her heart. Zelda died while Rose was in England, somewhere around her 30th birthday. She had no known relatives left at that point, so her funeral was attended only by Rose and Hal.

Trivia

• The timing of Chantal's transplant makes it highly likely that her donor was one of the victims of the worldwide mayhem caused by John Dee.