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.