Another cosmetics store. I pick up a sample jar of cream, dab a bit on the back of my hand. Dragonfruit Surprise Body Lotion. I sniff my hand. Mouldy fruit smell, mixed with the bad flower perfume. I smell like a compost heap.
A raven-haired salesgirl pops out from behind a caddy of bronzing products. “Are you familiar with our services?”
“Um, no. This is my first time here.”
I’m struck by her perfect ponytail, the crispness of her pink blouse. Lip gloss so shiny I swear I can see a shadow of my reflection. “Our list is there,” she points behind me, “on the wall, or you can pick up a pamphlet to take home with you. We take appointments or, if we have time, walk-ins. This week we have a special on lash extensions—partials are half-price.”
“Partials?” I say.
“Yes, we attach the lashes to only the outer half of the eyelid.”
“Attach, permanently?”
“Semi-permanently. The service comes complete with a care sheet, extra glue and a special solution to dissolve the adhesive if you wish to take them off.”
“Oh, sounds interesting.”
“If you want, I’m open right now. It only takes about ten minutes.”
I think of Maria’s doll lashes. I look at my watch—still a good twenty minutes until I have to meet her. “Sure,” I say, and follow the girl to the back of the store. I sit in the makeup chair; she swivels me to face a mirror lined with bright, round light bulbs.
“I’ll just grab the supplies,” says the girl. “Here’s some information about our services. I’ll be back in a sec.” She leaves a lavender pamphlet on the counter and skips away, dark hair bouncing.
I peruse the list of services that will make me more attractive, or happy, or both. The various treatments promise rejuvenation, glow, definition of my skin, my eyes, my very soul. You don’t need a degree in psychology to know they’re trying to create a feeling of lack in the consumer, one they will happily correct, for a fee. Still, I notice that they have eyebrow shaping on the list too. I look in the mirror. I should pluck mine more regularly.
“Right, here we are.” The girl returns with a plastic tray full of bursts of two or three lashes, spider-legs bunched into a single knot at one end. She sets out tweezers and a little dish of clear goo that smells like an industrial cleaning product, then swivels me away from the mirror to face her. She grabs a cotton pad and starts to wipe off all of my eye makeup. “Have to start with a clean slate,” she says. “The glue won’t stick if you’ve already got mascara and other stuff on there.”
I take a quick peek when she’s done, and feel panicky when I see the circles under my eyes, concealer-free, exposed in public.
“Now, you might feel a slight stinging sensation, because of the glue,” she says as she begins to shellac my lids with the goo. “But not to worry, it isn’t harmful.”
At first I don’t feel anything, but as she continues to attach three, then four knots of lashes, I feel a slight tingle that gradually increases to an uncomfortable stinging. The glue settles onto the perimeter of my eyelid; the discomfort elevates to a raging burn.
Think about something besides the burn, I tell myself. My mind wanders back to the diary segment Maria sent me last week. Since I read it, Báthory’s been appearing in my dreams. Last night I dreamt she was at the supermarket in the produce section, dressed all in white, platinum hair tied back in tight braids, diamond chandelier earrings. She was standing in front of the strawberries and I was afraid to pick up a carton.
“Try not to squint your eye so much,” the salesgirl says. I attempt to keep my glue-ravaged lids closed and as still as possible. She starts attaching the lashes on my other eye, and the discomfort there seems more bearable, maybe because I’m expecting it.
“Ah, you are here!” says a voice a few feet away. “I run out of my best lipstick, so I come early to do some shopping, and here I find you!”
“Maria?”
“Please try to stay still,” says the girl. “Almost done,” she says with forced cheeriness.
“This is not so usual for her,” I hear Maria say to the girl. “It is good, she is trying for a new look.”
I hear Maria sniff. “Dani, you also have some new perfume? You are a bit earthy.”
“Okay, you can open your eyes.” The girl spins the chair around towards the mirror. “Just don’t touch them until about half-one, and you’ll be right.”
I lift my lids and see my naked eyes, lashes dark and feline. Like I belong in a mascara commercial. The dark circles below my eyes cancel out the fantasy.
“Very nice, Dani,” says Maria. “I always did like your eyes. But you look quite tired, dear.”
Chapter Six
I met Maria at a conference called “Blood Crimes: Histories of the Deviant” at the University of Vienna. The conference wasn’t a big academic draw; more than a third of the presenters were “independent” scholars or, as Carl referred to them, “mere hobbyists.” I was at the welcome wine and cheese, cornered by a librarian from Düsseldorf who was trying to talk to me about Charles Manson (I think), despite my insistence that “ich spreche nicht Deutsch.” Over his shoulder, I saw a woman at the hors d’oeuvres table, loading her little plate with a hill of green olives. She had long hair, dyed that vibrant shade of red found on drugstore shelves in Eastern Europe. She noticed me staring and walked over. Her long black skirt rustled as she moved, and light spun off the string of amethysts at her neck.
“I am Maria,” she announced, and kissed me on the cheek. She turned to the librarian, said something in German, and he walked away. “I see you have met Dedrick. I sent him to get us some wine, and the queue is quite long right now.” She spoke with an accent I couldn’t place.
“Thank you. I mean—”
“No need to pretend, it was plain he was boring you. Olive?” I took one from the plate she offered me. “And you are?” she asked just as I put the olive in my mouth.
“Danica,” I mumbled.
“A Slovak name,” Maria said. “You have ties there?”
“No, I think my mother just liked it. Probably heard it on a soap opera.”
She said nothing and looked away, as if she were searching for an excuse to leave. “Are you giving a paper here?” I asked.
“Oh, no, I had some meetings in town and a few of my colleagues suggested I stop by this conference.”
“What field are you in?”
“Archival, curatorial. My main research focus is Erszébet Báthory.”
“Really?”
Maria smiled and stepped close to me. “Ah, you know about the Blood Countess?”
“Of course. She is...”
“Thrilling? Yes.”
“Have you heard about that murder in England? The man who was supposedly obsessed with Báthory?” I asked her. Foster had committed his crime just the week before; all the English news reports I’d watched in my hotel room were covering it.
“Shocking, isn’t it?” She smiled. “This reception, it dwindles. Shall we go elsewhere?”
Over glasses of Märzen lager, Maria told me about her visits to Čachtice, Báthory’s castle. She had found pottery shards and pot handles at the ruin, and she thought these artifacts might complement the records and transcripts from the trial of Báthory’s servants, carried out in Bratislava in 1611.
“This evidence, it supports some of the testimony, especially from her manservant Fizcko. Have you read the transcripts, Danica?”
“Not really. I’ve heard them mentioned in books about her, though.”
“Ah, yes. Fizcko, he reported many of the ways they tortured the girls. Do you know that they poured pots of water over the girls in the snow? Once the girls were almost frozen stiff, ice statues, but not quite yet dead, the Countess would order the pot handles to be heated up in the fire, then pressed on the girls’ hands, backs, bellies. The searing handle would brand the girls’ flesh.” She paused here, took a sip of her beer.
I’d never met someone so enthusi
astic about Báthory. I watched her drink her beer and waited for her to continue about her research. Her passion for Báthory was almost tangible. When she spoke, even in the dull light of the pub she was radiant.
“And Danica, will you incorporate Báthory into your research? This terrible crime in England, the criminal, he would be an interesting subject for a psychologist, yes?”
I laughed. “I suppose. Though there’s no way I’d ever get to work with him. I’m still a grad student.”
“So?” Maria stared at me for a moment, blinked exaggeratedly a few times, her blue eyes fringed with thick lashes. “You finish your program, you go do what you want, work where you want.”
I laughed again. “That’s a nice thought. But it’s not that simple.”
“Of course it could be that simple. It is like Báthory’s diaries.”
“I didn’t know she kept diaries.” The bartender came by and I ordered us another round. I felt Maria and I could talk all night.
“It is rumoured. We do not know where yet, but if they have survived I will find them.” She said this with complete conviction. “Danica, you are staying in Vienna for how long?”
“A couple more days,” I said.
“Then you should see Čachtice!” she said. “We will go tomorrow, by train.”
The next morning, I waited for Maria in the Südbahnhof. Commuters and travellers swept through the doors and moved to and from the platforms. I was sitting on a hard metal bench by Platform Two, holding my ticket to Čachtice. I kept scanning the crowd. Our train was due to leave in six minutes. She’d show up, I told myself.
The train was standing at the platform, and I guessed the announcements over the loudspeakers were saying that it was about to leave. Maria still wasn’t there. I debated: should I wait, hope she’ll turn up later? But the way Maria had described the journey to the castle, it sounded easy. Take the train to Bratislava, then to Nové Mesto nad Váhom, connect with the train to Čachtice, see the ruin, come back. The trains ran until midnight, so I had lots of time to make the return trip. I checked my bag: camera, wallet, phrasebook/map. Passport snugged away in my pants pocket. I stepped onto the metal steps of the train, found my way into a second-class car and took a seat. I felt slighted, and disappointed that Maria hadn’t shown up. But I’d find Báthory’s castle on my own.
The train pulled into Nové Mesto nad Váhom at eleven sixteen; I had four minutes to make the train to Čachtice. I stepped down from the car and crossed over a set of tracks to the station. It was bustling—four sets of tracks came through this stop, and people were filing on and off the platforms at a quick pace. My ticket said the train to Čachtice would leave from Platform One. No trains to Čachtice were listed on the board, but there was a one-car train sitting on the track at Platform One. I stopped someone in a blue uniform and asked, “Čachtice?”
He nodded, “Áno” and I climbed up the rusted steps.
The car had bench seats and was half full, some mothers with little children, a few men. They all stared at me as I got on board. I was glad to see an empty bench at the end of the car. I slid in and sat next to the window so that I could see the station sign when the train approached Čachtice. The sun beat through the windows and heated the car like a greenhouse. The air was humid, heavy with the acrid smell of sweaty bodies. I held my ticket in the palm of my hand. I checked it twice; the sweat from my palm soaked the edges of the paper. According to the schedule, the ride would take eight minutes.
Two men boarded the train and sat beside me. They were in their mid-twenties, wearing dusty jeans, heavy workboots. They stared at me, then whispered to each other. The man closest said something to me in Slovak. I shook my head, said “Anglický” and pointed to my phrasebook. The two looked at each other, laughed, then continued to stare.
The train started to move, iron wheels clanging against the track. As we picked up speed, the car rocked from side to side. It was a mild movement, but twice the men pretended to be swayed by the motion and slid down the bench. At the next opportunity, one of them careened into me. He feigned he was powerless to prevent his thigh pressing against mine. I flipped through my phrasebook, at a loss for how to string together a sentence that conveyed the sentiment “get away from me.”
I settled for Prepáčte mi, which meant “excuse me.” The two men laughed. The train started to slow down, and I looked out the window, happy to see Čachtice written in three-foot-tall white letters on the upcoming station.
I shoved my phrasebook into my bag and stood up as the train came to a stop. I said “Prepáčte mi” again, loudly, tromped over the feet of my two seatmates and into the aisle. A girl, maybe five years old, was sitting on the edge of a bench. She smiled at me. I waved as I walked by, but her mother pulled her close, whispered something to her and stared back at me, lips tight.
I was the only person to disembark. The small train started up again and disappeared down the tracks into the hills. I breathed in the warm, sage-tinged air, happy to be out of the stench of the car. Then I looked at Čachtice station.
All the windows were closed and white boards were nailed in an X across each one. I had planned to buy my return ticket from the station; now I was abandoned amid rolling green hills and wheat fields. No town, no people in sight. Dragonflies flitted among the wheat stalks and the smattering of wildflowers growing between the tracks; their wings shone purple, green, silver under the noon sun. It was picturesque, but didn’t help to assuage my panic at being stranded on the edge of the Carpathian mountains.
I walked around the station. There was a throbbing, rotting smell and the buzz of a fly swarm. By the side of the abandoned building lay a mess of bones, ripped fur, dirt stained with blood. Deer. Its head, gnawed on by something—Carpathian wolves?—was almost severed from the rags of its body. The kill site looked at least a couple of days old. Maggots writhed in one of the deer’s half-ravaged eyeballs. I ran past the carrion towards the gravel road behind the station.
The road ran parallel to the rail tracks for about six hundred feet, then curved and disappeared behind the hills in either direction. There were no signs, no cars. To my right, I spotted what looked like a gravel quarry, about a hundred and fifty feet down the road. It was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, with a small plywood shed outside. I dug out my Lonely Planet, cobbled together a rudimentary greeting for whomever I might meet at the shed and walked towards it.
As I neared the quarry, two Dobermans ran around the corner of a parked dump truck. They lunged against the wire fence that cordoned off the quarry, their claws and teeth snapping, woody breath humid on my bare arm, droplets of their saliva landing on my skin. I skittered back, tried to talk to them, but each word I uttered made them bark louder. I ran past them, towards the shed at the end of the fence. I hoped the owner was more friendly than the dogs.
A man stepped out as I approached the door. He was about forty years old, maybe older, and wore overalls with dusty work boots. He slouched against the door frame and scratched his ear, raised his bushy eyebrows and didn’t smile at me.
I slowed down. He chewed on a toothpick and gave me a once-over. A few seconds later, he shouted something to the dogs. They backed off, but kept pacing the length of the fence.
I waved at him and moved closer. “Dobrý deň,” I said, “Kdeje hradl” This was supposed to mean “where is castle” in Slovak, but the man looked confused. I tried again, but this time opened my phrasebook and pointed out the word hrad on the page.
“Ah, hrad!” he said, his voice gruff. He drew the outline of a castle in the air.
“Hrad!” I said and smiled. He looked perplexed. I looked over my shoulders; the dogs had stopped pacing and were sitting as close as they could to the shed, panting.
Maria had made it sound like it was no problem: get off the train and boom, there’d be the castle. Nothing about a smelly train, lecherous seatmates, a maggot-filled carcass, an abandoned station in the middle of nowhere. I’d be lucky not to be eaten by half-
crazed dogs, let alone actually find the castle and somehow catch a train back without a ticket.
The man spat on the ground. He pointed down the road, then walked two fingers across his left palm. I nodded, thanked him and started walking. The dogs jumped against the fence as I passed, another cacophony of barks and growls.
The road was straight for about a mile and then curved around the hill. By the time I reached the curve, I regretted wearing my jeans; the denim felt like thermal long johns in the summer heat. I walked faster, anxious to get to the town, a building, water, someplace out of the sun. I berated myself for not being prepared for the hike, not researching more thoroughly how to get to the village from the station. But Maria had promised we’d go together, she’d be my guide, that she’d been there “of course, many times before.” I wondered exactly how many times she’d trekked along a rural Slovakian road for miles in thirty-degree heat.
I pushed on, bombarded by grasshoppers each time I stepped on the thick tufts of grass that rimmed the edge of the ditch. Most of the hoppers pinged off my jeans, but some leapt higher, the barbs of their legs and beady heads rough against my bare arms, my face. I was ready to cry from the heat, from the frustration, when I finally reached the end of the curve and saw there was only another mile at the most before the road turned to asphalt. The road passed through a graveyard, then into a town ahead. I hoped it was Čachtice.
I slowed down when I reached the graveyard. The hardtop road split the field of graves in two. Rows of graves nearest the road were simple slabs of stone, weathered black, a lace of moss inhabiting the cracks. About a third of the stones had bright flowers on them, or white candles, unlit, encased in clear glass globes. A raven landed on one of the slabs and cawed repeatedly.
I was almost through the graves and at the edge of town when a loud, tinny voice came from a speaker that was strapped to the top of a telephone pole in the ditch. The voice spoke urgently, almost a yell, in Slovak. It was repeating the same phrase over and over. I looked around for any security cameras, any watchmen. Was the voice talking to me? My throat was dry and I gripped my purse strap, my hand soaked with sweat. I walked back a ways, looked, turned, looked. Thought about going back to the station. Then the voice stopped and the speaker started broadcasting accordion polka music. I was disoriented, and had to take a minute to calm down and get my bearings among the graves.
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