House of Bathory

by Linda Lafferty

  “My little monster,” she murmured, still holding the girl’s chin. “How delightfully ugly you are! Not like your charming friend, Slecna Vida.”

  “Yes, Madame,” Zuzana replied, looking into her amber eyes. “I live to serve you, my Countess.”

  “Yes,” the Countess said, pulling the girl beside her to gaze into the looking glass. Zuzana shut her eyes.

  “Open your eyes, my pet.”

  The girl opened her eyes wide at her mistress’s command and saw their reflections side by side in the silver glass.

  “Do you think I am still beautiful?” the Countess asked, looking at her image in the mirror, her chin pointing left and then right. Bathory’s gaze was childlike and wistful, black lashes framing her feline eyes.

  Zuzana did not hesitate.

  “Of course, Madame, your beauty takes the breath from anyone who gazes at you. You are the fairest woman in Hungary!”

  The Countess cast a look of scorn, her arched brows diving together above her thin nose. More words tumbled from Zuzana’s mouth. “—and of the Holy Roman Empire and beyond, Madame. More beautiful than the youngest maiden in Christendom, and far beyond to the Oriental kingdoms, I am certain.”

  The Countess’s face softened and she gazed at herself again in the glass. Her blood-red lips broke into a smile, exposing her even white teeth. Zuzana felt a cold chill clutch her spine.

  “But I am two and a half score,” the Countess replied, studying her reflection.

  “Ah, but Countess! Not in the looking glass. See the white skin and blazing eyes! How they beseech your admirers to embrace your beauty.”

  The girl took up the silver brush, gleaming in the torchlight. She softened the boar bristles in the palm of her hand, bending the stiff hairs back and forth until they were supple.

  “With your permission, Countess.”

  Her mistress lifted her chin, almost imperceptibly. Zuzana stroked the long auburn hair, taking care not to tug at any errant tangle.

  Erzsebet Bathory closed her eyes and moaned, her long, pale fingers twisting together in her lap.

  “Ah, Zuzana,” she whispered. “If you were only beautiful…like your brother.”

  Beautiful? Her words sent another shiver up the girl’s spine. The Countess noticed a small tremor in the stroke of the brush and looked up at the girl’s pox-scarred face.

  Zuzana was no beauty now, God be praised.

  Chapter 3

  CARBONDALE, COLORADO

  NOVEMBER 19, 2010

  I’m looking forward to our session,” Betsy said. “Did you bring your dream notebook?”

  Daisy’s eyes seemed glassy and unfocused. She said nothing.

  The psychologist held her breath. Not again, she thought.

  Daisy entered the office like a sleepwalker. Then she saw Ringo, the mongrel shepherd curled up on a hooked rug, warming himself by the stove. It was the first time in months that Betsy had brought him downstairs to the office.

  The girl’s body relaxed, light returned to her eyes, dimples creasing her white makeup.

  “What a gorgeous dog!” she said, her hand extended for him to sniff. “May I pet him?”

  “Of course,” Betsy said, marveling at the transformation. “He’s a big baby.”

  Ringo licked the girl’s hand. Although sweet and gentle, he wasn’t a licker, and Betsy’s forehead puckered in astonishment.

  He thumped his tail hard, as if he recognized Daisy.

  Then he licked her white face. Betsy felt a stab of jealousy.

  “He never licks anyone on the face. Not even me.”

  Daisy extended her neck as Ringo sat up, still intent on licking her.

  “This is strange. It’s almost as if he knows you,” said Betsy.

  Daisy buried her face in his fur. Betsy noticed tears glistening in her eyes, as she stroked Ringo’s ears flat against his head.

  They started the session talking about dogs and went on from there. It was by far the longest conversation patient and doctor had ever had.

  “I had a German shepherd when we lived back in New York,” Daisy said. “We had several dogs, but Rosco was mine. He slept in my bed and ran alongside my horse on trail rides.”

  “Tell me about riding.”

  “I used to ride. A lot. I rode competitively, three-day eventing, horse shows.”

  “But not now?”

  “I don’t have a horse here and I—I’ve lost interest. It’s not my world now,” she said, turning away. She looked longingly back at Ringo.

  “What is your world now, Daisy?”

  “Goth.” She answered, her voice losing its softness. A pinched look took over the youthfulness that for a few minutes had shone through the white makeup.

  Betsy called Ringo over. He laid his head in his mistress’s lap and she stroked his ears.

  “What is Goth exactly?”

  Daisy moved in the armchair, shifting her weight. “It depends who’s defining it.”

  “How about you? How do you define it?”

  “There’s the music. I’m not big into that, except Jim Morrison and the Doors, old stuff. The heavy metal, forget it. But it’s a scene for Goths.”

  “What else?”

  “Black clothes, edgy hair, makeup. All that. But the real thing is shunning the superficial world, trying to see past the surface. Embracing the shadow world, not shutting the portal like most humans do.”

  The psychologist held her pen poised in the air.

  “The shadow world?”

  Daisy wound a strand of dyed black hair tight around her finger, just the way Betsy often did.

  “Shining a light into the past—” she replied, the sheer effort of speaking seeming to torture her. She coughed, but struggled to finish her sentence. “—into the black tunnel. The darkness beyond, who we truly are. Who we may have been before.”

  Betsy made herself look down at her notebook. She had expected to hear a tirade against the mainstream culture, a defense of an alternative lifestyle. Rebellion.

  “Do you think you do it to annoy your mother?” Betsy asked.

  Daisy smiled slowly, her tongue searching mischievously for that rebellious tooth. Ringo stood up and left his mistress for her patient’s outstretched hand.

  “Not really.” Then she shrugged. “Well maybe, but that’s not the point. I’m just trying to concentrate.”

  “Concentrate on what?”

  Daisy dropped her hand from Ringo’s chest. He groaned as he made three circles, finally lowering his body and curling up by her feet.

  “On murmurs, voices that have lived before. To hear ripples of the past. And…,” she said, the muscles in her jaw straining, “the search for my soul.”

  Betsy nodded. Her heart was racing. Daisy sounded as if she were quoting Carl Jung himself.

  Betsy made two cups of ginger tea with honey. Daisy drank quietly, looking around the room.

  “Oh, I need to tell you that I have an upcoming trip. I’ll miss a week’s session with you, but we can try for two sessions the week before I leave or when I get back. I’ll take a look at my schedule.”

  Daisy cast her an anxious look.

  “You are going away?” she said, picking at her cuticles.

  “Just for a few days,” said Betsy, noticing the effect her words had on her patient.

  Daisy nodded, her movements stiff. Her eyes fixed on the cream-colored bookshelves, from floor to ceiling.

  “You have a lot of books. Have you read them all?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “They look really old,” said Daisy. She stood up and ran her finger along the spines, inspecting the cracked leather with her fingernail.

  Betsy winced, but didn’t interfere.

  “Leather. Really dusty. Like these are ancient. Where did you get them?”

  “I inherited them,” Betsy said, looking out the window at the trembling aspen branches.

  Daisy tilted her head to the side to read the titles. She stopped at a slim, clo
th-covered book. She began to pull it from the shelf and then stopped.

  “Jung?”

  Betsy nodded.

  Daisy tried to read the title on the spine, but stumbled badly. “Synchronizitat…Akausalitat…What the fu—?”

  “In English it translates to ‘Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.’ We had a first edition of it once. But it disappeared.”

  “What does that mean?” Daisy asked, pushing the book back on the shelf.

  Betsy knew she had to redirect the conversation, but she didn’t want to risk having her patient shut down, reverting to moody silences.

  “Synchronicity was a theory of Jung’s. It is the idea of two or more events that are apparently unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner.”

  The girl wrinkled her white-painted forehead. “What does that mean?”

  “OK. Let’s say you hear your cell phone ring four times in the morning, but no one is on the line when you answer. And then later in the day, you hit four stoplights, all turning green, right in a row, and that has never happened to you before. At school, there is a lottery and you pick the number 4444 and you win. There is no causal relation, but there may be a deeper meaning.”

  “Goth,” Daisy said, rolling her kohl-lined eyes. “Totally.”

  “It is interesting you would say that—”

  Daisy turned back to the shelves of books. “You inherited them? From who?”

  “My father.” Betsy swallowed hard. Why was she answering all the questions now?

  Daisy’s hand halted in midair. It fluttered down again to her side. She stared over her shoulder at Betsy.

  “Your dad was a shrink too?”

  Betsy touched her tongue to the roof of her mouth, making herself hesitate. She wanted to answer: My father was a renowned psychiatrist. He was the real thing, a graduate of the CG Jung Institute in Zurich and a faculty member of the Jung Institute in Vienna. He treated some of the world’s most prominent families. He worked with patients with serious psychosis, behind the locked doors of an asylum.

  He was a genius, she wanted to say.

  “Yes, he worked in the field of psychology. Daisy, please. We need to talk about you.”

  “OK. OK.”

  Daisy collapsed in her chair, heaving a sigh. She picked up her cup of tea. She studied its depths and tipped it up to her mouth, obscuring her face. Betsy could see the gleam of white skin shining through the part of her dyed jet-black hair.

  “What kind of relationship do you and your mother have?”

  Daisy looked over the brim of her cup, her eyes hardening.

  “What do you think? You’ve seen us. We fight like cats and dogs.”

  “Which is your mother? A cat or a dog?”

  “Oh, definitely a cat,” she said, nodding. “Oh, yes. A cat.”

  “Why a cat?”

  “I don’t know. You can trust a dog. Cats are…different. And my sister, Morgan—even more of a cat.”

  “So you don’t think you can trust your mother or your sister?”

  Daisy twisted her mouth. “I didn’t say that, Betsy.”

  “And you? Are you a dog?”

  “Absolutely,” she said, rubbing Ringo’s side with the toe of her boot. “I’m just a loyal dog.”

  The psychologist made a note, her pen gliding over the white sheet of paper.

  A cell phone chimed.

  “You forgot to turn off your cell phone,” said Betsy.

  “Yeah, sorry. I got to take this.”

  Daisy fished a black iPhone out of her purse. Then a ruby-red cell phone.

  “Hello?…Dad, I can’t talk.… Yes, I am.… I’ll call you later.”

  Betsy noticed her patient wince.

  “…I don’t know…later.” Daisy punched the END button hard, as if she was trying to kill it.

  “Your father.”

  “Yeah, it won’t happen again. I forgot to turn his phone off.”

  “His phone?”

  Daisy hesitated.

  “He wants me to have this one with me, all the time. It’s got a GPS tracking device. Like he knows anything about where I go in the Roaring Fork Valley. Big deal. He gives me extra allowance if I take it with me everywhere.”

  “Doesn’t he live back East?”

  “Yeah, but like, he is so weird,” she said. “It’s part of the divorce arrangement. He wants to keep in contact with me.”

  She covered her mouth and coughed hard, phlegm rattling in her throat. Betsy handed her a box of tissues.

  “Spit it out, Daisy. Really.”

  “That’s gross,” she said, struggling not to choke.

  “It’s healthy. Like an athlete does. Don’t swallow, spit it out.”

  Ignoring her, Daisy swallowed hard.

  Betsy watched her struggle to clear her throat. Then, when she thought the girl had recovered, she asked, “Why do you think your father—”

  Daisy turned her face away.

  “I don’t want to talk about my dad now, all right?”

  Betsy knew she was testing the ragged edge of Daisy’s patience.

  “OK. We’ll talk about something else,” she said, scanning her notes. “You said you listen to ripples of the past. Your past?”

  “No. No, a long time ago. I dream of a castle. Jutting up into the sky from an outcrop of rock. Like something from a Dracula movie. Very Goth, right?”

  “Go on.”

  “Red velvet drapes. Heavy dark furniture. Enormous chests with big iron hinges. And—a strange smell, like…”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a coin purse. Like pennies rubbed together. Metallic.”

  Betsy scribbled down Daisy’s words.

  “Anything else?”

  “I see horses. Most times,” she said.

  “Are the horses comforting to you? Or are they menacing?”

  “Mostly comforting. But sometimes they are terrified, rearing and whinnying, like they smell a fire.”

  “Do they strike out at you?”

  “Oh, no. Never.” She paused. “They warn me.”

  Chapter 4

  ČACHTICE VILLAGE, SLOVAKIA

  NOVEMBER 28, 1610

  The mud-splattered coach shuddered to a stop at the outskirts of the village of Čachtice. The crossroad led up the hill to the gray-and-ivory castle looming against the sky.

  The carriage horses snorted in the cold, clouds of vapor rising into the frigid air. Their eyes were ringed in white as they pranced nervously, straining at their bits.

  “Quiet now!” urged the driver. The brass lanterns on either side of the coach swung wildly, banging against the wood as the carriage lurched.

  “Passenger Szilvasi, descend at once!” shouted the driver.

  A flock of ravens exploded in flight from the castle walls. Their screaming call was answered by the ear-piercing whinny of the horses, rearing in unison, sharp hooves slicing the air.

  “Get out!” shouted the driver, wrestling the reins.

  Janos Szilvasi jumped down from the coach, throwing his sack into the snow beside the muddy road.

  “Let me quiet them,” he shouted up to the driver, as he approached the horses.

  “Get away!” said the driver. “They will strike you! Stay away from the mare—”

  Janos made a soft whistling sound, staying to the right of the rearing horses. The mare could not see the ravens now. She looked nervously at the human being who approached, her nostrils flaring.

  “Easy, now, easy, easy, easy,” Janos crooned in a singsong voice as if speaking to a child. And again came the strange whistle.

  The mare reared again, her whinny echoing across the valley.

  “Stay away!” shouted the driver.

  Janos did not heed him. He steadily worked his way closer and closer to the horse’s shoulder. He slowly placed a hand on the mare’s neck, murmuring as he looked at her from the corner of his eye.

  The skin on her neck quivered under his touch, rippling like a lake sur
face punctured by a barrage of stones. The harness slowed its jingling as the mare calmed. All the while Janos spoke to her, his breath small puffs of mist in the cold air.

  The mare relaxed her tightly bunched neck, slowly lowering her ears closer to the man’s mouth.

  “What are you saying to my horses?” asked the driver, his voice full of suspicion. “Are you casting a spell on them? Come away from the horses.”

  “Let him, you fool!” shouted a thin passenger, craning his neck through the carriage window. “The horses will overturn the coach and kill the lot of us!”

  Janos did not look away from the mare. He moved in front of her, risking a strike from her powerful foreleg—a blow that could easily break a man’s leg. He could feel the warm breath of the second horse, a bay gelding, trying to reach his hand with its muzzle. He ran a hand over the chest of the gelding. He moved to the right of the coach and faced the steep road.

  “A horse sorcerer,” said a kerchiefed woman, looking out the window of the coach, She shoved her husband’s head out of her way so she could see better.

  “Thank you, sir,” said the driver, blowing out his breath, as he felt the slack in the rein. “You have skill with horses.” He wiped his nose on his ragged sleeve. “The Countess should be pleased to have you.”

  “I hope that is so,” replied Janos. Then he nodded to the horses. “Was it the ravens that startled them?”

  The driver shook his head, and motioned for Janos to come near. He whispered, “They always sweat and rear when we pass by Čachtice Castle, night or day.”

  Janos noticed the driver’s hand tremble in its fingerless glove. He could smell the slivovica, the fiery plum brandy, on the man’s breath. The driver drew a silver flask from his pocket, offering his passenger a draught.

  “To steady your nerves for Čachtice Castle,” said the driver.

  Janos shook his head.

  The driver shrugged and took the drink himself, his body relaxing as the harsh alcohol slid down his throat.

  “We must make Beckov before nightfall. I bid you well, Passenger Szilvasi.”

  Janos backed away.

  “Ya!” shouted the driver, slapping the reins lightly on the horses’ backs. The wheels of the coach churned up frozen mud, leaving Janos at the side of the road.