Blood Ritual

by Sarah Rayne

  He walked deliberately across the small brick courtyard, occasionally pausing as if looking up at the castle. Hilary had said there was a parapet at the edge – Michael felt for it and was rewarded with the scrape of stone or brick. Eighteen inches high? About that. He moved warily along until he found the break. Now what? Steps? Oh God, can I manage steps? He set his teeth and grasped the stick and, as he did so, he heard, quite distinctly, the sound of footsteps crossing the hall behind him.

  It was one of the worst moments yet. Michael swung between a wish to run away and the knowledge that to run would be the most damning thing he could do. Could he meet whoever it was and fool him? One of the biggest giveaways was the way the blind were unable to look directly at the person they were speaking to.

  And then the steps came running towards him and they were light, breathless steps, and suddenly, blessedly, it was Hilary.

  She was out of breath but she was unharmed. Michael clutched her hands, wanting to grab her to him, knowing there was no time.

  ‘I’ll explain later,’ said Hilary, ‘but we have to get away—’

  ‘Not in the car,’ said Michael, who had worked this one out inside the castle. ‘The guards will surely have disabled it. And we can’t simply walk along the road until we find a phone-box. We might walk for miles out here.’

  ‘And the guards are still searching for us.’ Hilary sent a hunted look over her shoulder.

  ‘Can you see them?’

  Hilary scanned the hillside. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, they’re further away, but they’re still searching the undergrowth.’

  The undergrowth that Michael might very well have walked through moments before . . .

  ‘What about the castle’s own cars?’ he said suddenly. ‘Where they put the BMW that first night—’

  ‘Converted stables,’ said Hilary. ‘At the rear.’ And with the words, they were half running round the castle’s side walls. Hilary’s hand about Michael’s arm, pulling him with her.

  The cars were there. Michael smelt them the minute they went in: metal and rubber and warm oil.

  ‘Two cars,’ said Hilary. ‘A Land Rover thing—’

  ‘Four-wheel drive. Fast but noticeable. What’s the other?’

  ‘I’m not sure if I could manage a four-wheel drive anyway. The other’s smaller – some kind of hatchback.’

  ‘If the keys are in it we’ll take it,’ said Michael at once, and Hilary stared at him, the knowledge of what they were about to do suddenly dawning on her.

  ‘But – we can’t steal their car . . .’

  ‘If we go back down to the BMW we run the risk of the guards again. And,’ said Michael, inexorably, ‘if we find that they have put the BMW out of commission, we’ll be stranded.’

  ‘Were you serious about that?’

  ‘Yes. Think about it. They know you’re here somewhere and they know you can blow the whistle on them. They’ll do anything to stop that. They could have slashed the tyres, smashed the steering lock . . . But if we can drive hell for leather down the mountain path, we’d be back in Debreczen before they knew what had happened.’

  ‘But it’s stealing . . .’ said Hilary again.

  ‘Then we’ll go straight to the police and confess!’ Michael reached for her hands. ‘Dear girl, we’re committing a small crime in order to bring a far larger one to justice,’ he said, and his voice was suddenly gentle. Hilary bit her lip because it was much more difficult to cope with her emotions when he understood how she felt and treated her feelings so seriously. ‘These people are mass-murderers,’ he went on. ‘You saw them kill that girl.’

  ‘And I think they’re planning to kill Catherine’s brother and imprison Franz-Josef,’ said Hilary, staring at him. ‘Yes. All right.’

  ‘Are the keys in the hatchback?’

  ‘I can’t see if—’ Hilary leaned forward. Michael waited.

  ‘No.’ He felt her hand close over his arm in panic. ‘Michael, there aren’t any keys.’

  Michael stood very still, his mind working furiously. Of course the keys would not be left in any of the cars. The denizens of Csejthe Castle would have made very sure that no one could effect an escape. It was a miracle that Hilary had been able to bring the BMW out.

  If he had his sight he could have smashed the steering lock of one of the cars and joined the ignition wires. If he had his sight . . .

  ‘Hilary,’ he said urgently. ‘There may be a way. But we’ll have to be quick and you’ll have to do exactly what I tell you.’ Blessedly she did not protest or question; she simply said, ‘Yes. Tell me.’

  ‘Both of us in the car first. Jesus God where’s the door handle . . .’ He forced himself to remain calm. Hilary’s hand came over his, warm and familiar, guiding him to the door and into the passenger seat.

  Michael said, ‘Wretched foreign car. Everything on the wrong side.’ He felt Hilary slide into the driver’s seat on his left. ‘Are you with me, lady?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘All right. Now take my stick – that’s right. What you’ve got to do is smash the moulding around the ignition switch and expose the wires behind it. One quick sharp blow. Understand?’

  ‘I – yes.’

  ‘The object is to pull out the whole of the ignition switch, so that we can get at the wiring behind it.’

  ‘The ignition switch . . .’ Hilary sounded momentarily thrown and then she said, ‘The silver metal circle where the keys go in?’

  ‘Yes. Can you do it? One clean blow would be best. Use the head of the stick – it’s heavier, and try not to damage the wiring beneath the switch. It’s doubtful if anyone will hear in here, but it’s probably best to be as quick as we can.’ He tried to visualise the interior of the car – any car. Was there sufficient room to make a strong enough sweep? Wasn’t it how opportunist car thieves worked every night of the year? There had to be sufficient room.

  But Hilary slid out of the car, leaving the door open, and Michael heard the swish of the ash stick as she brought it down. There was the sudden crunch of plastic and wood splintering.

  ‘Done,’ said Hilary, a note of triumph in her voice.

  ‘Good girl. Can you see the wiring?’

  ‘I – yes.’

  Michael knew that it was important to be very quick. The guards were still searching the grounds, but at any minute they might come back to investigate the castle itself. They could not afford to waste a second. He said, ‘Pull out the ignition switch – carefully! – so that the wires come with it. Don’t let them disconnect. Understand? If a wire breaks we’re lost. Slowly.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hilary after a moment. ‘Yes, I’ve done it. Now what?’

  ‘Give it to me.’ He felt her put the metal and wires into his hands and ran his fingers over the switch mechanism, forcing his hands to convey the images to his mind. Five wires – or was it seven? Were foreign cars wired in the same colours as British ones? Oh God, if only I could see! But he said, ‘Among these should be two wires of the same colour.

  ‘Brown? White?’ said Hilary. ‘Mostly white with a coloured stripe?’

  ‘Ignore the brown – I think that’s the battery. Any plain white?’

  ‘Yes – here –’ Her hands guided him.

  ‘All right.’ Michael took a deep breath. ‘This is probably the trickiest bit, but it’s not so very hard,’ he said. ‘First be sure that the car is in neutral.’

  ‘It’s in neutral. It’s another automatic clutch, but it’s in neutral.’

  Michael did not know if automatic transmission would make it easier or harder to connect the starter motor, but he didn’t say it. His mind touched on the need for choke. Was it automatic choke as well? Please God.

  ‘All right,’ he said, speaking slowly and deliberately. ‘The wires will be held on to the underside of the switch by metal tabs. You’ll have to pull them off.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hilary again. ‘Yes.’

  ‘So far so good.’ He frowned again, trying to think of
things she could connect with. ‘You’ve wired plugs? For irons or vacuum cleaners?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This isn’t so very different then. This is a question of switching, but doing it in a more direct way.’ Another deep breath. ‘There’ll be two stages,’ he said. ‘The first stage is to join the two white wires together – connect them as cleanly as you can.’

  ‘Twist one round the other?’

  ‘That ought to do it.’

  Hilary hesitated and Michael, understanding, said, ‘There’s no power. You can’t get an electric shock. What will happen is that the first stage of the ignition will engage: like the first part of turning the key. It’ll give lights, indicators, maybe the radio.’

  ‘I’ve done that,’ said Hilary, after a moment.

  ‘Good again. The next part is to engage the starter motor.’ He paused again, thinking hard. Hilary waited and tried not to feel ignorant. How many people knew how to start a car this way for heaven’s sake?

  ‘Take any two of the other wires,’ said Michael. ‘Not the ones already joined, but any other two. And simply touch them together. Imagine you’re turning the key all the way round to start the engine. Remember how it always springs back a quarter turn. Touch and release. When you get the right two wires the car will start.’

  He felt her concentration. After a moment, she said, ‘Nothing.’

  ‘It’s a process of elimination. Try again. And remember that the instant the starter motor kicks in you’ll have to drive us out of here like a bat escaping hell.’

  ‘Yes.’ Hilary was managing to be very calm. She stared at the wires again, and wiped her palms on the sides of her thighs.

  The white and red to green this time. They touched and fell apart.

  Nothing.

  ‘Again,’ said Michael’s voice inexorably. ‘Keep trying. Systematically.’

  White and red to blue. Silence.

  White and red to white and yellow? It was the only combination left. She touched the wires and with a growl of triumph the car sprang into life. Hilary dropped the wires instantly.

  ‘Michael, it’s worked!’

  ‘So it has!’ He leaned back in his seat. ‘And now drive straight out and don’t stop for anything!’ The reckless grin flashed. ‘The game’s afoot, lady. God for Harry, England and St George!’

  ‘I hope there’s enough petrol in the tank,’ said Hilary in a prosaic voice.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The preservation of Elizabeth’s houses had been one of the Family’s early major preoccupations. The sale of her castles and lands had been enormously lucrative; even with the Bathory stigma attached they had attracted wealthy buyers. The Family had kept Varanno and Csejthe and the Vienna house in the Blutgasse where Elizabeth had stayed as a young childless bride. They had lost the Vienna house during Austria’s muddled troubled Hapsburg years, but Franz-Josef, approaching CrnPrag through the darkening afternoon, thought it had been one of Fate’s strange ironies that Catherine, coming four centuries later, should choose as her convent that very house. Had she been closing one of the strange circles with which Time was so often studded when she passed under its portals?

  He had not told Catherine of her Convent’s history and he had stopped Pietro from doing so on that last day at Varanno. If Catherine needed to run away, even in this unexpected way, she must do so, and Franz-Josef thought that if Elizabeth walked anywhere it would not be in the Vienna House where she had lived so briefly, but in her beloved Csejthe.

  Csejthe had passed in and out of the Family’s hands two or three times over the years: for a while it had been requisitioned by the Imperial army, which had added hugely to the Bathorys’ coffers, of course. It had been burned twice, once in the early eighteenth century by French Army Officers – for which we made them pay dearly afterwards! thought Franz-Josef with a sudden wry smile – and then again in the nineteenth by the frightened and superstitious people in the surrounding hill farms and the villages. The Lady lived again, they had said. The Beast of Csejthe was walking once more. In the end, the fears that had seethed beneath the surface for years had erupted into hysteria, and there had been that infamous torchlit procession to the castle, the villagers chanting prayers and shouting death to the Beast. They had fired it in twenty-four places and the flames had lit the sky for miles around.

  But somehow the Family had saved it. Somehow they had doused the fires and quenched the hysteria and somehow they had regained it for the Bathorys. Franz-Josef remembered that there had been intrigue and bribery, although he could no longer recall the details, but at length they had got Csejthe back and in the closing years of the nineteenth century they had restored its interior in much the way they had restored CrnPrag.

  CrnPrag. CrnPrag had never been one of Elizabeth’s lairs; it was something that had been grafted-on. The ugly old mansion, situated on its strange boundary lands, had no butchered ghosts to walk its halls, no lingering memories of torture and agony, but there was a darkness about it all the same. We bestowed our own darkness on CrnPrag, thought Franz-Josef.

  Stefan had exulted over CrnPrag’s situation: ‘Neither quite of Transylvania nor of Moldavia,’ he had said. ‘A borderland territory. And if we are clever, answerable to neither country.’

  Transylvania had become Romania, and Moldavia little more than one of its provinces, and so far as Franz-Josef knew there had been no awkward questions. By the time the twentieth century was ushering in its morass of certification and bureaucracy and permits, CrnPrag had been sufficiently established for no one to wonder about it.

  Franz-Josef had never seen inside the jutting wing at the rear of the house, where the chapel had been, but he knew that it was there that Stefan put the gleanings of Tranz’s work: the homeless, the dispossessed. The frightened, bewildered creatures who came trustingly into what they believed to be sanctuary. There had been so many of them over the centuries: such widely differing races and creeds and cultures. Russians and Romanians and Poles. Czechs and Austrians. More recently, of course, Bosnians. All lambs to the slaughter. CrnPrag had become the Family’s storehouse, as Csejthe had once been Elizabeth’s. Food for the rituals.

  The prisoners were segregated, of course: the men in one dormitory, the women and children in another. ‘We take the men only as a blind, anyway,’ Stefan said with one of his sly smiles.

  The men were mostly painlessly slain just before each of the rituals, and their bodies put into a communal grave in the grounds. But children were a different matter. Children were mouldable. The girls were saved for the rituals – ‘Virgin blood, my dears,’ Elizabeth might have said – but the boys were carefully treated, and indoctrinated into loyalty and gratitude to the Family. The Jesuits had known the value of having a child up to the age of seven, and the Family knew it also. The stateless youngsters received schooling and every care, but Franz-Josef thought wryly that it was a distorted schooling, almost a brainwashing. He had never forgotten those disquieting rumours about CrnPrag’s links with Germany fifty years earlier. Did Stefan employ Mengele’s methods on the children in CrnPrag? Did he perhaps use drugs to destroy their wills and even their memories? It was entirely possible.

  The majority of the boys became servants in Varanno or Csejthe or in CrnPrag itself, often working their way up to positions of authority. Those with aptitude were given medical training to enable them to assist Stefan with the asylum side, and a judicious number of the girls were spared the ritual and trained in domestic skills. Inevitably there was inter-marrying. Stefan had known that to keep people happy you gave them three basic things: shelter, food and sexual gratification. To this he added a fourth: the prospect of advancement and monetary rewards. Start as a humble scullion but work hard and prove yourself and you could end in a position of authority. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. And labour is basic to wealth. The Family’s strange, secret realm had undeniable elements of Marxism in it, but whatever name was put to it, it worked. There was
hardly ever a case of rebellion or even dissatisfaction.

  As CrnPrag’s gates loomed before him, Franz-Josef felt, as he always felt, the darkness that clung to the old mansion. Entering CrnPrag was like plunging neck-deep into black, ice-cold water. But Pietro is somewhere in there. And Cat? Was Cat in there as well?

  The gates were locked and barred as they always were, and he got out of the car and pressed the electronic device at the side. At once a tinny voice – one of the guards? – came crackling out of the speaker, and Franz-Josef said tersely, ‘I am here to see my cousin, Stefan Bathory.’ He was aware of arrogance in his words and his tone, but he was damned if he would meekly submit his name into an electronic box and wait to be accorded permission to enter one of his Family’s houses. There was a brief silence, and then the voice said, ‘Please to come in.’ There was a whirring of machinery and the great gates swung open. As Franz-Josef drove through, they clicked shut behind him with disconcerting abruptness.

  Shadows lay across the chequered hall where once the Family had butchered the long-ago workers from Wallachia and Moldavia, and as Franz-Josef entered the house, he felt a prickle of unease: the faint hackle-rising instinct that had warned his ancestors of danger ahead. Something ahead that is threatening . . . Something waiting for me . . . He turned sharply about, but as he did so there was the crashing sound of the huge doors being slammed shut, and two of the guards barred his way. Two more appeared from the shadows and stood at the foot of the stair directly ahead of him.

  Franz-Josef forced authority into his voice. ‘What is this? You will take me to my cousin, if you please.’

  There was a split-second of silence, as if the guards were overcoming their instinct to obey him. And then one that he remembered as being high in Stefan’s hierarchy, a coarse-featured man with an oily skin and small, mean features, stepped forward.

  ‘Your cousin is not here. And I regret, Herr Bathory, that we have our orders,’ he said.