by Sarah Rayne
‘O God, I am sorry and beg pardon for all my sins . . . I detest them above all things . . . Because they have offended Thee . . .’
It was asking forgiveness before the act, of course; it was trying to put yourself in credit with God. The venal medieval priests who had sold penances and traded in indulgences had known about that. Give money to the Church and you will gain remission: five years fewer in purgatory. Go on a crusade, take arms against the heretics and have twenty years knocked off your purgatory sojourn. Payment in advance.
And now I am doing the same thing. Bargaining with God again. An Act of Contrition against an act of murder.
But Elizabeth’s dark taint was filling her up, and Elizabeth’s hunger was tearing into her flesh.
Her mind was splintering, and beyond the jagged tears were the pouring rivers of blood . . . Like soft rainwater against your skin. Like a lover’s caress . . . Pietro, where are you now . . .?’
God help me for what I cannot help myself, whispered Catherine and, wrapping the thick dark cloak more tightly about her, she slipped into the night streets of Vienna’s Old Quarter.
It was very easy to stand in the shadows, unseen by passers-by. Catherine, hitherto permitted out only under the supervision of Sister Marie-Claire, stood for a moment, feeling the ancient agonies of the butchered Knights Templar soak into her mind.
Pain and blood.
She picked out a quiet intersection where three streets converged and where low archways spanned the street at intervals. Narrow openings led down to small enclosed courtyards, several feet below street level. There were dim alleyways and, set near to the pavements, were small, grimed windows indicating empty basements or cellars. Exactly right. A pulse of anticipation began to beat in her temples and she glanced at her watch. Eleven-thirty. Very late indeed by convent standards, where the nuns were required to be in their rooms by ten, unless there was a night vigil.
But eleven-thirty was not very late in the streets. It was an hour when people would be making their way home from wine bars and pubs and restaurants. There would be a great many escorted girls, but there would be some lone ones as well; older teenagers and young women in their twenties who had failed to find a partner for the night or who had quarrelled with a boyfriend and were making a rather disconsolate way home.
A shiver of excitement swept through her. This was easier, this was closer than crouching in the dark watching for cars to flag down.
And, as with the cars, primeval instinct gripped her, so that she felt before she heard the creature’s approach. Something tempting this way comes . . .
There was the rapid tapping of high heels on the cobbles, the brief glimpse of a cheap, badly cut coat. As the girl passed under one of the lit windows, Catherine saw that she was quite heavily made up and that her hair was streaked with ash-blonde.
Elizabeth would have been aware of the stale odours of infrequently washed flesh and old sweat from her victims; Elizabeth’s descendant, standing in the shadowy alleyway, was aware of cheap perfume. She felt her fingers curl into predator’s claws. Oh God, I want to sink my nails into her flesh. I want to rip open her skin and feel her blood gush over me . . .
She waited until the girl had gone past, seeing how the creature glanced nervously over her shoulder from time to time. So the quarry scented the hunter, did it? So much to the good. Fear would lend an edge to the culmination. Elizabeth’s smile curved Catherine’s lips, and she moved out of the shadows.
The tapping of the girl’s high heels had a rhythmic, almost sexual pattern. Catherine stole after her, keeping to the shadows, keeping the dark cloak wrapped about her. Elizabeth walked at her side. There had never been any point in shutting her out, of course. She would always return, she would always surmount the carefully built walls or chisel her way through the painstakingly constructed armour. Elizabeth and I together . . . Yes, it was inevitable.
Elizabeth was with her when the girl paused at the corner and stood looking about her. She might be looking for a passing taxi or she might have arranged for someone to collect her here. Either way, it did not matter. Catherine glanced about her. A good place. No one in sight; no prying windows overlooking them. To the right was one of the dark alleyways.
Catherine bounded out of the shadows, her cloak billowing out, and fell on the girl, knocking her to the ground. There was a gasp of surprise, and then a choked-off scream as Catherine’s hands closed about the creature’s neck.
Don’t kill her yet . . . Disable her only . . . The blood must flow . . .
Elizabeth’s words echoed in Catherine’s mind, exultant, insistent, and she half carried, half dragged the girl into the dark alley and pushed her against the wall. She closed in. Anyone passing by the end of the alley would take them for a pair of lovers, a man and a woman locked in an embrace. She could feel the girl struggling, she could feel the thrust of soft breasts with the rise and fall of lungs beneath.
There was a moment, terrible, scalding, when Catherine – the real Catherine who had loved Pietro and who had fought Elizabeth – surfaced, and shuddering horror at what she was about to do swept over her. I must not! Let me run away now!
And then Elizabeth closed about her again, and there was nothing but the need for the blood, there was nothing but the slaking of the raging hunger, and this was only some common little girl, some street trollop. Catherine tore away the girl’s cheap flimsy satin blouse and tore her nails into the jugular vein.
Chapter Eighteen
The blood had run in the same way for Elizabeth’s banquet, but there had been more of it. It had puddled on to the floor of the long low room in the Viennese house that looked out over the cobbled courtyard, and lain in dark, glistening pools, so that Dorko had to spread cinders on the floor the next day.
The girls had come willingly into the house. Dorko had promised them a rich and easy life in the Countess’s service; Illona had welcomed them and given them a midday dinner in the stone-floored sculleries just below ground level. It had been the easiest thing in the world to slip one of Dorko’s potions into the wine flagons: the creatures were unused to wine anyway. They had giggled and tossed their heads and pretended to be worldly-wise, but they had drunk the wine vulgarly and ignorantly, pouring it down their pretty white throats like the peasants they were. Illona was glad she had not wasted the Lady’s best vintages on them.
The problem was going to be the used bodies, as it always was the problem. It was all very well for the Lady to say. Dispose of them: she was not the one who had to do it. She did not have to drag sacked corpses out of Csejthe’s dungeons by night, or think up tales about agues and plagues to fool the snooping Ponikenus, so that the poor emptied bodies could have Christian burial. Not that anybody really cared whether the corpses got Christian burial or not, but you might as well bow to convention where you could. And it was as well to be very wary of Ponikenus, although if it came to it, it was doubtful if anyone would listen to a humble village pastor’s word against the wife of the great warrior Count.
And Ponikenus was far away, ministering to his flock in Csejthe, and nothing should be allowed to spoil tonight’s banquet. This was to be the Lady’s most ambitious ritual yet. Sixty peasant girls, every one of them to be killed for their blood. They had come a long way since the memorable day when a clumsy maidservant had bled on to the Lady’s bare arm.
Dorko, who had taught the Lady the first of the simple forest incantations, and Illona who had helped preserve her marvellous pale beauty, were determined that nothing should hinder tonight’s feast.
As the sun slid behind St Stephen’s Cathedral, bathing the old room with its latticed windows and its long oaken tables in a soft red glow, the Lady entered. And even after so many years, even after witnessing their mistress in her tantrums when she drummed her heels on the ground in rage and screamed until she was exhausted; even after seeing her in the grip of her most violent blood-lusts when she beat her victim until the creature was one huge wound, even after all of that,
Dorko and Illona were still not able to repress a shiver of awe. The Lady did not make grand or ceremonious entrances; even at the most formal of banquets or receptions she never insisted on footmen springing to attention or lines of bowing attendants. She did not need to. For her to simply enter a room was sufficient. She was slight and almost frail: unclothed she weighed barely more than a child, but the instant she entered a room every eye turned to her.
She stood inside the door of the long low room now, gowned in a loose white silk robe tied at the waist, with a scarlet velvet cloak slung negligently about her shoulders. Her hair was unbound, and her eyes darted from side to side, drinking in the assembled girls, seeing that they were flushed and heavy-eyed from Dorko’s potion: ‘Mandragora,’ she had said in an aside to Illona, ‘it has never failed me yet.’
It had not failed her now. As Elizabeth surveyed her prey, a slow smile curved her lips. The assembled girls were drowsy and lethargic. Drugged but not unconscious. Sufficiently awake and aware to feel pain. Exactly right. She slid her hand down to turn the key in the lock and to slide home the iron bolts.
You are locked in with me, my dears . . .
It began slowly and in an almost civilised fashion.
The Lady went from table to table, presenting dishes of food and flagons of more wine to the imprisoned girls, who were not yet fully aware of their imprisonment. She was gentle and calm but her voice held the familiar caressing note and Dorko and Illona exchanged meaning glances. The Lady is purring over her prey.
And then – no one quite knew when or how it began – but there was suddenly something cold and evil in the room with them. At one minute it was not there: at one minute there was simply a rather unorthodox feast being held and all was well. Some of the girls had got up to dance, moving to and fro at the centre of the room, singing in their sweet, untrained voices, stumbling and tripping over one another in their semi-drugged states.
And then, in the next minute, in the blink of an eye, in the single beat of a bat’s wing, nothing was well and everything was wrong. Those who had been dancing and singing faltered to a stop and turned to look at the slight figure garbed in scarlet and white, and those who had remained seated tried to stand, pushing back their chairs and struggling to their feet. Every eye was on the Countess.
The Lady stood motionless for a moment, the hunger flaring behind her eyes as if twin flames had been lit. Madness, red and stark, glared from her eyes as if a mask had been ripped aside.
And then she bounded forward, tearing off the thin silk gown as she did so, so that her naked white body gleamed in the candlelight. As she fell on the first girl, sinking her long fingernails into the creamy neck, blood began to spurt, and the Countess flung back her head and gave vent to a low cry.
Screams rang out and the girls began to make for the door, but Dorko and Illona were there at once. Dorko stood barring the way, her meaty forearms crossed, her brows drawn down forbiddingly, and the girls faltered and glanced at one another uneasily. It was easy for Illona to partly stun the prisoners from behind as they scrabbled at the lock, and then to drag them back to their seats. Spiritless things they were, with no fight in them. Several of them had fallen to their knees in attitudes of prayer.
Dorko stalked across the room and flung open the doors of a large press in the fireplace recess. The girls were almost all screaming now, and it was necessary to be swift and efficient. Probably no one would hear them, but you could never be sure.
Inside the press were the earthenware pots, and Dorko scooped them up and placed one beneath each girl’s chair. At each place she laid a glinting butcher’s knife and a square of white linen. Occasionally the Lady liked to wipe her hands.
She did not do so now. She went systematically from place to place, taking up the knives, one for each prisoner, slitting each one’s veins, sometimes using the throat so that the blood spurted, sometimes simply making small slits at wrists and breasts, so that there was a slower, thinner trickle. Blood dripped from her hands and ran down her wrists and arms, and the once-calm, once lavender-scented room was becoming fetid with the stench of fresh blood. From time to time, the Countess’s mad laughter rang out, blending with the steady dripping of the blood into the pots. Elizabeth crouched over each prisoner, crooning a mad little song to herself.
‘The blood never failed me yet,
Never failed me yet.
It lifts me from the dead,
Never failed me yet, never failed me yet.
Though I die, I shall live . . .’
Her long hair swung forward over her face; she was completely absorbed in her task, but several times she put up a hand almost absently and rubbed the fresh warm blood into her skin, exactly as if she were rubbing in a new beautifying lotion. Her arms were scarlet to the elbows, and blood dripped from her hands as she walked from place to place.
Illona was dragging the white porcelain bath from the bottom of the press, and Dorko was gathering up the earthenware pots, some of them overflowing on to the stone flags, tipping the contents into the bath. The girls were crying and plucking at the servants’ skirts, begging for mercy, but too dizzy from the drug to fight properly. Dorko threw a triumphant glance to Illona. Mandragora!
Night was falling over St Stephen’s Cathedral, and black shadows were creeping across the floor when Elizabeth finally stood back, shaking her hair back from her eyes, her skin crusted with blood. She showed no trace of fatigue; her eyes burned with such intensity that Illona, who was not a fanciful person, had the thought that the wall-candles hardly needed to be lit: the light from the Lady’s eyes would illuminate the entire room.
But the candles were lit, of course; they burned up strongly and sharply, casting a reddish glow everywhere. The carnage was complete; the girls lay in ungainly sprawls, some of them on the floor, others slumped across the table. Here and there they were entwined in a companion’s arms, as if reaching for comfort. Rivulets of blood still trickled from one or two, but in the main they were emptied, milked, their skins were marbled and waxen.
Elizabeth approached the bath slowly, her eyes fixed upon it. Behind her Dorko and Illona held their breath. This was the culmination, this was the heart and the core and the matrix of the Lady’s ritual. Immolation . . .
The blood never failed me yet . . .
Elizabeth lifted her arms above her head, the palms turned upwards. She stepped into the bath and the thick warm gore cascaded over her skin.
It had been so easy for Elizabeth. The things that the Blutgräfin could do, the things she could command and demand, were not things that Catherine could demand.
The girl in the Blutgasse that night had died slowly. Catherine had felt the blood soaking her own skin and, for an unmeasurable time, there had been the remembered ecstasy. This is what matters, this is what has come down to me. The Bathory legacy, the bequest of the Blood Countess . . .
And then the awakening had crept over her, as it had always done, and she was aware that she was crouching, shivering and sick against the alley wall, with the emptied body at her feet.
This was not sixteenth-century Vienna or Romania, where servants could be ordered to dispose of the body. Nor was there a dark enveloping forest where a body could be buried without anyone seeing. They were in the heart of a city, only minutes from one of the main thoroughfares. Catherine stood up, looking about her and, after a moment, she wrapped her cloak about the girl, making a kind of lumpish parcel. She dragged the body deeper into the alleyway – heavy! dead meat! – pausing every few steps to listen. But nothing stirred, and no curious footsteps came clopping along the street.
At the far end of the alley was a flight of steps leading down to one of the innumerable little courtyards below street level. Windows overlooked it, but they were all boarded up, and even in the uncertain light, Catherine could see that grass grew between the flagstones, giving the place an air of neglect. She tumbled the body down the steps and into the deep shadow of what looked to be a small disused warehouse. Wi
th luck there would be no hue and cry for a day or so. With luck she would get back inside St Luke’s.
God – or more likely the devil – was on her side that night. No one saw and no one heard as she slipped like a shadow through the small side door of the convent that she had left unlatched. The bloodied clothes could be burned in the convent’s incinerator, where so many other bloody and soiled things were burned. Catherine stole through the silent house – Elizabeth’s house – and pushed them into the furnace, wincing at the scrape of the metal lid. In the morning Sister Margaret would fire the incinerator as she always did, so that not only would soiled dressings be hygienically disposed of, but the convent’s kitchens would have hot water for the day. The things would burn unnoticed, and no one would notice if she wore one of the other dark blue dresses in place. Most Orders were rather parsimonious about the issuing of new garments; the Poor Clares had to make one set of clothing last for several years, but in Orders where they worked with the sick, things were a little different. Even Sister Clothilde seldom questioned a request for the replacing of a scapular or a skirt or even an entire new habit.
I escaped that time and all the other times, thought Catherine, curled into a corner of the small cupboard in CrnPrag. I learned cunning again, as I learned it at Varanno. She stretched her cramped limbs and looked at her watch. Six o’clock. From the sculleries came the clatter of pans, and the occasional snatch of conversation. Several hours yet before she could steal out and make her search. She thought she should wait until midnight at least. Then there were six or seven hours yet to wait. Six or seven hours until she could try to find Pietro. She fell into a half doze, afraid to let her mind relax completely, but drifting into a state of semi-consciousness. She thought she could be instantly alert if footsteps came this way.
She curled back into her corner and waited for night to fall.
Chapter Nineteen
Franz-Josef had left Varanno shortly after lunch and driven himself down the mountain path and along the desolate but rather beautiful road that led to the old mansion.