COUNTESS
Prologue:
Erzsébet
There are those
who still speak of Erzsébet Báthory in hushed voices.
Villagers who
lived through the nightmare and survived, forever branded by horror, destined
to carry the tale far into the future to ensure that it endured with a life
of its own, beyond its telling as a mere tale. In truth, there was nothing
simple about the stories uttered about the Countess, even when they were
told by the older children seeking frighten their younger siblings or by
the old crones whose task it is was to pass on the history of the village.
There are tales that are too dark to speak off despite their basis in fact,
even though the old people still wake up in the night screaming in fear,
whose eyes show the haunted memory of things no one should ever have to see.
To them, she still lives even if she no longer walks among them as she once
had.
The men who remember
speak of her with less hostility then the women of the villages that once
came under the provincial domain of Castle Csejthe
and its masters. The men remember her differently of course. For it is the
way of men to cloud their minds with fanciful exaggerations that hide their
weaknesses where else with women, it is far simpler to speak the truth for
it is always possible that the same evil could return. The men see her in
their mind's eye as the loveliest creature that ever walked the earth. Some of the old still dream of her as she was on the day when
she had been brought to the castle for the first time.
She had been
but sixteen years old when she became the bride of Ferencz
Nadasdy, the reigning Count of castle Csejthe. As a daughter of the Hun Gutkeled clan whose power base stretched over much
of Easter Europe, the marriage had been extremely favorable for the Count
whose interest in fighting Turks was now financed by Bathory money. With his grand and well paid army,
the Count left his youthful bride to her own devices and went forth to fight
the Moslem scourge that was threatening much of
Her beauty was
not to be underestimated for it was renowned indeed. With alabaster skin
possessing the texture of fine cream, it was said that hers was the face
of angel belonging to the body of a goddess. Yet there was nothing angelic
about her for she was alone in her bed during her husband’s absences and
her voracious appetite for sex was only equaled by her thirst for blood.
She liked to watch people suffer and those who owed debts to her husband’s
coffers would find just how agonizing it was to settle their accounts. While
the men could only remember the beauty of the lady, the women remembered
the screams.
And there was so many.
They stretched
long into the night until children wept themselves to sleep in order to keep
from hearing the pain that tore through the air and made the wolves howl
at the moon in sympathy. At first, the bodies did not appear for she had
been wise enough to hide them well. However, when there became so many that
it was not possible to conceal them within the castle walls, then they were
discarded in the river and too many people began to find loved one’s whose
flesh were stripped from their bones in death. There was nothing to be done
about it of course for she was the Countess and those who had been killed
were supplicants with good reason to be punished though preferably in a far
more merciful end then what they had received.
For twenty years, she killed as many souls as her husband did during his
war with the Turks. They died in more agony some believed then the quick
thrust and parry of a wound received on the battlefield. Erzsébet liked to torture and after a time when it
seemed that her beauty never seemed to wane. She looked as radiant as she
had when she first arrived in their midst and though they could not understand
how this could be, they could not deny it was true. She did not age. There
were whispers that she was a witch and it was perfectly legitimate for she
surrounded herself with those who practiced the dark arts, though none of
the lesser aristocracy dared make comment about her activities. Such remarks
were often fatal.
The Countess
was not a forgiving woman.
However it was
when she fell into the company of a local woman whose named would be attached
to hers forever in villainy, did she finally become more than just another
blood thirsty Magyar. Her legend began with her association with the woman
called Majorova. The two seemed to feed of each
other’s sadism and their hunger combined together was voracious as they embarked
upon a course that would shake the foundations of Hungarian society to its
core and demand the intervention of the Emperor himself. Yet no one, even
in their wildest imagining could have predicted the scale of what the Countess
and her evil companions would do.
There was always
talk about witchery where the Countess was concerned but when the skies started
opening up, when strange creatures began emerging from within the Castle,
they knew that there were more than just spells afoot. The skies would bleed
and the land faltered under the abuse of magic that had no business being
invoked by those as powerful and evil as the Countess and her coven of witches.
Majorova was the first but there would be others
who would join the black circle of power that she had created. Along with
Majorova, there was Katarina
and later Dorotta Szentes
and together, they had begun a quest that was nothing less then bridging
the gulf between hell and earth in order to rule both. This much was admitted
when the witches were burnt at the stake years later although Erzsebet herself escaped that fiery demise.
However, the
sorcery and the desire to bring forth hell on Earth paled in comparison to
six hundred dead young women. For years, the best and the brightest flowers
of the province disappeared. It was believed at first that some terrible
beast had come out of the woods and fed its hunger by taking their daughters
but then no evidence of such a creature was ever found and though hunters
searched the woods endlessly, they could not stop the killing. One by one,
young women disappeared. They were taken from within locked rooms, stolen
out of their homes and their bodies found later on drained of blood and almost
always tortured. Some, it was learnt when the bodies were found, did not
die immediately and took months to find their way to their families for burial.
People started to leave out of fear for their children. Young women who
came of age fled the villages and still the body count did not stop. It began
to fill the rivers, until each day a new corpse was found in the same brutal
manner. The villagers thought themselves cursed and cast their gazes anxiously
at the castle, not daring to speak what they all suspected and meanwhile,
the Countess continued to take her midnight rides through town, looking ever
the same, her beauty unmarked by time or age.
Inevitably, there
were no more young women and for a time the deaths stopped and the villagers
began to rest easier, thinking that perhaps the carnage had ended. Then the
news arrived that Countess was opening her home to young noblewoman from
across
It was a worthy
arrangement, one that gave hope to those around her that perhaps she was settling
into a move conventional lifestyle. They could not have been more wrong and
perhaps it was the influx of so much new blood that made the Countess careless
for no longer were the bodies of the victims deposited at the river. Instead,
they were cast down from the walls of her fortress, leaving a clear trail
of incriminating evidence to their murderer. This time there was no hiding
who was responsible and as the families of the
victims rallied to the Emperor demanding justice, all eyes turned to the Countess
in accusation.
Hungarian Emperor,
Matthias II, who had long heard the disturbing rumors about the Countess
and was held back by the ancient belief that no member of the aristocracy
should stand trial, moved quickly to get to the truth. It would be a truth
was beyond what anyone had ever expected or could believe. A hundred soldiers
appeared at the castle one terrible night, not long after the bodies were
found at the foot of the walls. They seized the fortress and found a veritable
chamber of horrors. The young women who had died were not merely drained
of their blood, some were slit open and left to hang upside down with manacles,
while their blood raining a shower over the Countess who supposedly used
the crimson flow to maintain her beauty. She bathed in their death and sometimes
had an ornate golden flask filled and brought to her like one would serve
a fine wine. Their arrival did not bother her in the least and she seemed
confident that she would not be harmed.
However, Matthias
was no fool. Amidst the rumors he had heard about the Countess, he had was told of her ability to beguile men and hold them
under her sway. A ruthlessly logical man, he chanced nothing and sought the
aid of an ancient order to make the arrest without hindrance by sorcery.
The soldiers arrived at the castle with a young woman who was no more than
sixteen years old, no older than the Countess had been when she had first
taken her place as mistress. The girl whose name
was Brigitte of Lyons, faced the Countess and prevented any spell from infecting
the men that had come for her. There are villagers who claim the soldiers
had called this young girl as a Slayer but a slayer of what, they did not
know. However, it was clear that the Countess could not mesmerize her with
her seductive charm and while the soldiers put to death by the stake the
coven of witches that had aided Erzsébet in her
butchery, Brigitte death with the Countess herself.
Brigitte had
wanted Erzsébet put to death but Matthias was
still too much a creature of his aristocratic breeding to allow a Countess
even one was villainous as Erzsébet to be put
to the death. Despite the young woman’s strident arguments for the sentence,
Mathias decreed that the Countess who live out the rest of her life in prison.
As much as the Order to which Brigitte belonged would have preferred otherwise,
the Emperor of Hungary was not a man to be defied and so she begrudgingly
complied to his wishes and Erzsébet did not meet her end like the rest of her
companions. However, Brigitte was determined that the Countess would suffer
an eternity of torment and undertook the task of carrying out Erzsébet sentence herself.
While Matthias
would not agree to death for the Countess, he did acquiesce to Brigitte’s
demand to have Erzsébet barricaded in her own
room within the castle. Within the confines of her chambers, she would be
walled in forever, with only a sliver of space left exposed in order for
her to receive her food. Matthias found it most odd that the Countess was
near hysterical at the pronouncement of this sentence. Certainly it was harsh
but far less brutal than being burnt alive like the rest of her accomplices.
It required the restraint of several men not to mention leg and wrist irons
to finally calm the woman down. Until she was placed into her new prison,
the crude shackles were forced to remain because the Countess was almost
animal like in her frenzied resistant to her new situation.
And all the while
Brigitte remained close by, watching.
They say the
Countess died four years after being imprisoned in her castle but the villagers
who lived close by often swore they could still hear her screaming.