Blood Ritual

by Sarah Rayne

  Catherine thought she was not really being urged on by Elizabeth. This strange nocturnal walk was only because she was restless. It was because of what had happened. I am in love with my own brother . . . It was small wonder she could not sleep, it was small wonder she was out here, savouring the night –

  ‘– prowling the darkness like a she-wolf. . .’

  The night had changed; it was huge and filled with scuttlings and rustlings and there was the sound of wings beating overhead. It might have been frightening if you had not known there were things you could do to protect yourself. With the thought, Elizabeth’s consciousness trickled into her mind. Things you could do . . . Things you had found only after long consultations with the forest crones and things you had bargained and coaxed and threatened to get. The greatest prize of them all was the strange, ancient incantation, written in the blood of moles and the juice of hoopoes and hemlock, and inscribed on to the shrivelled caul of a newborn child, murdered as it emerged from the womb . . .

  Catherine went across the gardens like a shadow, Elizabeth with her so strongly and so closely that she was almost aware of a second dark silhouette scudding across the ground at her feet.

  She could hear the fall and rise of the caul incantation, and she recognised the language as a mixture of Czech and Serbian. But whoever was whispering it into the night spoke in a different cadence and used different pronunciations to any that Catherine had ever heard.

  However it is said, the power is there, little sister . . . Nothing can touch me and nothing will touch you either . . . The shadows stirred. And if you listen closely and if you listen with your mind not your hearing, you will understand the incantation as I understand it . . .

  For a moment, the words shivered on the air, and Catherine frowned, because there had been a fleeting instant of understanding. And then the moment vanished, and the soft, rhythmic chanting vanished as well.

  Varanno would have looked to Elizabeth very much as it looked now. The purple garden laid out in the last century would not have been there, of course, but everything else would have been the same.

  There would have been a carriageway leading up to the front door, probably the exact curve of gravel they used for the cars today, but then it would have been rutted from the hoofs of the horses and the wheels of the carriages. Catherine thought there had only just begun to be carriages then, and that they had been cumbersome and not very comfortable. She paused, drinking in the night air, her mind tumbling between two worlds.

  Elizabeth would have come up this carriageway many times. She had frequently travelled from one castle to another, always in immense style, preceded by outriders: haiduks, mounted and armed against roving brigands. There had been an awesome cortége: coaches filled with trunkfuls of gowns and furs and jewels, presents for her host and hostess: lace and embroidery and jars of wine and casks of spices and flagons of perfumed oils from the eastern lands beyond the Carpathians.

  During the journeys, which were often long and wearisome, Elizabeth liked to recline behind the drawn curtains of her carriage, listening to her two body servants, Dorko and Illona, reciting the minor transgressions of the girls of her household. They were ugly and coarse, these two, but it was fun to frame yourself with ugliness. And they were both immensely loyal and they vied for her approval. Dorko found new incantations from the forest crones which she laid before her mistress like an absurd panting dog; Illona had been Elizabeth’s wet nurse.

  Elizabeth always pretended not to listen to these two gabbling about the small, silly sins of servants. She pretended not to understand their thick, clumsy accents. But when the cortége halted she would lean forward, one slender white hand reaching out between the thick curtains of the coach, and she would beckon the miscreant to come to her.

  They always came. That was part of the satisfaction. They feared her, but they could not resist her. The story of the girl who had inadvertently pulled the Countess’s hair had spread; the story of what had afterwards been done to that girl had spread also. Beaten to death. Dragged to the castle dungeons, and flayed with whips by Dorko and Illona while the Lady watched. It was whispered that she had become one huge dripping wound by the end. And then the poor thing’s blood smeared into the Lady’s skin. If that was what you got for disobeying the Countess, no one was going to risk the smallest piece of disobedience.

  The wretched girls sat trembling on the edges of the padded velvet seats while Elizabeth held an inquisition, lounging back on the silk cushions, her hands tucked inside her fur muff, but the fingers curving in anticipation. Soon, soon, the blood would run and she would coat her skin with it. Thick, moist excitement pulsed between her thighs at the thought.

  Punishment could be extorted at once. In the thick, perfumed gloom of the enclosed coach, it was secret and exciting to see the blood run and to feel it taint the airless space. There were brass-headed hairpins that could be plunged into creamy white skin, so that the blood ran slowly and sluggishly; there were needles that could be inserted under fingernails. The coach became a world of its own, reeking with blood and fear.

  To begin with, Elizabeth had knelt at the victim’s feet, catching the dripping blood in her cupped hands, but later, Dorko or Illona brought little earthenware pots which stood on the carriage floor. The sound of the blood dripping into the pots was immensely arousing.

  Peasant blood was the most effective; she had discovered that at the beginning. The clumsy servant who had pulled her hair that first morning had paid very thoroughly indeed for her fumbling, but Elizabeth had almost loved the creature as the blood poured out of her. It was a pity she had died so quickly, but servants were expendable. Where there was one, there were a dozen, and who bothered to count them? Who cared if a foolish, feckless kitchen-girl was not in her bed when dawn broke? There were plenty of pretty plump creatures who would come skipping up the mountain road, thrilled to their naïve little souls to enter the service of the Countess. She would be waiting for them.

  The blood would not fail her.

  Varanno had not the huge retinue of servants in Catherine’s day that it had had in Elizabeth’s: people no longer cared to go into domestic service – degrading and poorly paid – and so there was only a cook with two village girls to assist her, and a gardener and a young boy for the grounds. Women came from the village to clean, paid by the hour, and were usually pleased to work in the evening if there was a party. But servants were no longer expendable.

  Lone travellers, however, were a different matter.

  It was immensely exciting to crouch by the roadside, the wet, earthy scents of the pine forests that fringed the road all about her. The dark, anonymous raincoat enveloped her, so that she melted into the shadows.

  Catherine held the torch firmly, her head tilted like a listening animal. Was there the purr of a car coming now? The road was a lonely road and there were few night travellers, but she could feel the anticipation thrumming on the air all about her.

  Other desires . . .

  And then the headlights of a small car were slicing through the darkness, and there was the growl of the engine coming closer.

  She stood in the centre of the road, waving the torch, directing its beam into the car’s path. There was the squeal of brakes and the screech of tyres as the car drew to an abrupt halt.

  It was ridiculously easy. A breathlessly told story of a breakdown – carburettor trouble of some kind. Her own wretched car had simply died on her, out here miles from anywhere. Would a lift to the nearest town or the first telephone kiosk be possible?

  The driver was a woman, not young, but still on the right side of thirty-five. She was rather coarsely spoken – peasant blood, my dear! – and she was instantly helpful and sympathetic. Catherine climbed into the passenger seat, the knife in her pocket.

  Chapter Seven

  As the BMW passed through the great, iron-sheeted gates of Varanno, Hilary heard them close with a silken whisper of well-oiled machinery. Ahead was a long drive, curving to t
he left, fringed by a tangled darkness of rhododendron and laurel and briar.

  She sat quietly next to Catherine and thought: I suppose this is all real. I suppose I am here in this remarkable land, and I suppose ordinary people do live out here. She sent a sidelong glance to Sister Catherine, sitting silently beside her. Catherine Bathory was not ordinary in the least and she had lived here: presumably she had grown up here. In the thickening light, Catherine’s eyes looked larger and darker, and the planes of her face looked sharper and crueller.

  Had Catherine never wanted to marry? With her looks there must have been opportunities. Hilary thought Catherine had not the unmistakable unawakened look of a virgin, but nor had she the smouldering banked-down fire of one who has struggled against sensuality. Either she took her vow of chastity lightly, or the question did not bother her. And with those eyes, with that mouth, I cannot believe it! thought Hilary.

  The house came into view, the shadows twisting eerily about it, the crimson-tinged dusk lying thickly across the dark grey stone. It was a great brooding mansion, built of some dark, rough stone, the windows tall and narrow, trellised with thin strips of lead. At the centre was a porch, as deep as a church’s, and Hilary glimpsed a huge black oak door with an iron ring-handle. She shivered and involuntarily touched the crucifix at her waist.

  Thick mats of dark ivy grew over parts of the walls, and in places obscured the windows. Those rooms would be dark, even on the sunniest of afternoons. The ivy would tap at the windows in the night, like thin, bony fingers scratching to get in.

  The drive was shadowy from the tangle of thickthorn and briar hedges. Had it been growing up for a hundred years while something slept at its centre?

  But Varanno was no enchanted castle, no slumbering citadel waiting for the Prince to hack his way through the brambles. This was a darker mansion altogether: it belonged to the Brothers Grimm, Perrault, Andersen. It was the Doubting Castle of Giant Despair that Christian approached with such trepidation, or the ogreish Dark Tower of Childe Rowland; it was Glamis with the monster prowling the halls . . . It was Castle Dracula . . .

  And on the other side of the Carpathian Mountains was the Land Beyond the Forest.

  ‘There are a few lights still on,’ said Catherine. ‘Do come in. I expect they’ll have left us something to eat.’ Hilary came abruptly back to the normal prosaic world where people left lights to welcome you if you arrived late at night, and made sure you would have something to eat. But, despite Catherine’s apparent lack of emotion and her concerns about lights and food, Hilary felt the desperate anxiety beneath.

  She took a deep breath and followed Catherine into the house.

  The large central hall was filled with flickering firelight, and Hilary stood for a moment in the doorway, looking about her. It was absurd to feel nervous. Entering Catherine’s home would be no better and no worse than facing the entire chapter of St Luke’s at the Professing of her Solemn Vows, which she had done two years earlier in a panic in case they threw her out into the world again. She drew a deep breath and stepped over the threshold.

  At each end of the huge stone-flagged hall beyond the door, somebody had lit fires, which was rather a nice welcome. The hearths were set at each end of the great hall; they were big enough to roast whole oxen and had probably done so many times. There was presumably electric light here: Hilary did not think there was anywhere in the so-called civilised world that did not have electricity now, although you might except the poorer parts of India and Africa, of course.

  But there were no signs that electricity had penetrated Varanno. Iron wall-brackets – would they once have been called sconces? – protruded from the walls, and in each one a thick, faintly-fragrant candle burned, casting pools of light directly beneath. Branched candlesticks were set before the oval mirrors with tapering candles set in them, and the tiny pinpoints of flame reflected over and over in the smoky depths of the mirrors. Through a glass darkly . . . I am seeing Varanno through a darkling glass . . . Is that better or worse than seeing it face to face? Thick crimson draperies covered parts of the walls, and the thick-paned trellised windows were set into the ancient stone on each side of the black oak door which lead directly outside. Purple-tinged dusk slanted in through the windows.

  Hilary had the feeling of stepping backwards; of slicing through the skin enclosing the safe, hygienic twentieth century. As if she might be entering a time where there would be no instant hot water gushing from taps, no glad flares of yellow light when you pressed a switch, no Germanically efficient cars that sped you along mountain passes. This was a world of flickering candlelight and of ruined castle keeps; a world where children and virgins were taken for their blood and where mandragora was still torn shrieking from the ground at midnight under a gibbous moon. Where Grand Guignol characters stalked, cloaked and slouch-hatted, brandishing blood-dripping knives . . .

  All quite absurdly fanciful. But Catherine’s family appeared to be accustomed to the kind of decadent luxury that Hilary thought had vanished with bustles and Edward VII. How on earth did people manage to live like this? Inherited wealth, shrewdly invested? Underworld art robberies? Wild visions of the Mafia and Al Capone dynasties tumbled through Hilary’s mind.

  But for all the richness, there was the impression of a threatening decay just beneath the surface. These were the ancestral halls of the melancholy Roderick Usher, but it was Usher before the putrescence overtook it. Had Catherine lived like this before entering the Order of St Luke? How had she adjusted to five o’clock rising and Lenten fasting and monastic simplicity?

  As they began to ascend the wide, sweeping stair, a thick, lumpish shadow coalesced, and something moved out from the shadowy recess of a half-curtained alcove on their left. Hilary gasped, one hand going involuntarily to her throat; the shadow moved forward. Her eyes went too high, and then fell.

  Not Christian’s despairing Giant, after all, but Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s gnome magician: the sly, stunted creature who helped the miller’s daughter to spin straw into gold . . .

  A dwarf, squat and hunchbacked and with the thick muscular shoulders and tiny arms and the distorted features reminiscent of a dozen dark fairy tales. It was ugly and misshapen, but it was one of God’s creations, and Hilary said in her sparse German, ‘Good evening.’

  Catherine said, ‘Hilary, this is Ficzko. He has been with my family for as long as I can remember.’

  The hunchback regarded Hilary levelly, his eyes flickering over her. When he spoke, his voice was unexpectedly deep and gravelly, and Hilary, who had been expecting a high-pitched, childlike timbre, jumped. There was a vaguely asthmatic wheeze overlaying his voice – weren’t hunchbacks prone to lung complaints? Or perhaps the gravelly wheezing was simply because the hunchback was a heavy smoker. You could easily imagine him having a rather revolting cough first thing in the morning.

  ‘You are the Sister from England,’ said Ficzko, and without warning, something gloating and suggestive gleamed in his eyes. He looked her up and down, rather as if he might be saying: and very tasty too. ‘Cat’s companion,’ he said, in his wet, rasping voice, and then, as if adhering to tradition, ‘You are expected.’

  Catherine said, ‘Ficzko, my father?’

  ‘In the study,’ said Ficzko.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Hilary felt the hunchback’s eyes on them as they climbed the stair and remembered afresh all the dark, gloomy castles where dwarfish creatures scuttled to do their Master’s bidding and doors swung silently open, and where the traveller was forever expected.

  The velvet-hung bedchamber with the huge tester bed was scented with drifting pot-pourri, and with beeswax and old timbers.

  ‘One of our nicer guest rooms,’ Catherine said. ‘I think you will be comfortable here.’ She opened the deep wardrobe built into one side of the fireplace. ‘My cousins left a few things behind, but there should be room for your belongings.’

  There was room to spare. Nuns did not travel so very much, but when they
did, they travelled light. Hilary had brought only fresh underthings, toothbrush, sponge and flannel, and her missal. There was her long navy raincoat, standard St Luke’s Order issue, which hung in a corner of the deep, lavender-scented wardrobe.

  A silvered oval mirror stood in one corner, reflecting the room dimly so that looking into it was like seeing through water or through rippled, ancient glass . . .

  The darkling glass again. Hilary washed and unpacked her few night-things and read the Office for the Day, but the familiar phrases which most of the other nuns considered soothing skimmed her consciousness. The tap at the door made her jump and as she crossed the room to open the door, her heart was thumping. Nerves. But in this house anything might come creeping along to tap at your door . . .

  The light was behind him, and for a moment, Hilary had the impression of a dark silhouette standing against the lampglow from the corridor. And then he moved, and she saw that he was smiling at her with Catherine’s eyes, and that he had Catherine’s slanting cheekbones. Catherine’s father.

  ‘You will forgive me if I intrude,’ he said, using careful, slightly stilted English, and glancing to the hastily laid down missal. ‘I am Franz-Josef Bathory. And I wished to assure myself that my daughter’s friend is properly looked after.’ The dark eyes scanned the room. ‘You have everything you need, Sister?’

  Hilary said, ‘Everything is very comfortable.’ Was it ridiculous to invite him into his own room? She did so anyway.

  ‘Thank you. For a moment only since it is so late. My wife sends her apologies – she will meet you tomorrow. She is resting.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Is there – can I ask if there is better news of Catherine’s brother?’

  ‘His condition is unchanged,’ said Franz-Josef. ‘But he is strong.’

  Hilary could not stop looking at him. This was a face that might have served equally well for the model of an early Christian martyr or a seventeenth-century libertine. Fanaticism and sensualist. It was a disturbing combination. As he came into the room, she saw that he was older than she had at first thought; his hair was silver and there were lines that the deceiving lamplight had not shown. As a young man he must have been astonishing. Hilary tried to guess his age and at once felt impertinent for doing so.