Bathory's Secret: When All The Time In The World Is Not Enough (Affliction Vampires Book 1) (14 page)

“Hopefully, nothing we need to worry about at the moment.”

Stopping at a large gate the Keeper turned to me, “When we enter this place you will only look down and you will not utter a word until we reach our destination!” We knocked and waited until a person in a loose black robe opened the door. Their heads and faces were covered so I couldn’t tell if they were male or female, Afflicted or not. The door opened to a long candlelit hall with a row of cloth cubicles on each side. The people in the cubicles could not see the person they were next to but the front was open if the curtain was not drawn. We walked all the way to the end and after a few moments the Keeper pulled the curtain of one and ushered me in. In front of me facing away, knelt a nun, like the one I had seen on my first day here, who was naked from the waist up. She was kneeling on the ground with her hands clasped tightly over a silver rosary and in deep prayer. Her neck and back were covered in bites, cuts and bruises in several stages of healing. The Keeper gestured towards the nun and told me to drink.

I did not have to be told again and quickly sank my teeth into her soft white flesh. I felt her body tense up and heard her moan as if in pleasure and whisper her prayers a little louder. The fresh blood was a welcome change to the tiny satchels I had been given in recent days. Immediately I got flashes of the nun’s thoughts which were mainly about Jesus on the cross, but I also got a sense of enjoyment or gratification. However, before long I felt a burning sensation at the back of my neck and heard the order to stop by my Keeper. I looked around and gave her an angry look for interrupting me and saw her gloved hand holding a small silver cross, the means by which she had burned my neck.

“That’ll do for now,” she said and ushered me outside through a different exit.

“Why did you have to burn me?” I glowered.

“How many days has it been since you last ate from a living person?”

“I don’t know fifteen, twenty?”

“And would you have let go, if I’d only told you to stop?”

I saw her point and didn’t answer.

“They need those nuns to stay alive in order to feed us. If they are exsanguinated then we have nothing to eat. We must exercise self-control.”

“Why do they allow us to drink from them?”

“It’s how they experience Martyrdom. The one you drank from is young and relatively new to the Order but others have been doing this for years and many grow to enjoy it to the point of ecstasy.” From what I could tell from the brief time I’d been there, the veneer of Martyrdom had helped these people build a monastic empire around a loose Christian dogma which sanctified all their perverse desires and materialistic excesses.

“Does anyone know how this Order was started?” I asked.

“I’m sure the Head Priest does, but he doesn’t share his knowledge with us. All I know is that I have been here virtually half my life and it was very much organized and active when I got here. He has been running this place like clockwork for a long time.”

“What do you mean he, you can’t possibly mean the Head Priest?”

“Yes I do.”

“But he is unafflicted, is he not?”

“Yes he is. He is very much human and mortal and the minute he leaves this place he will age and die within a few short years.”

“Then how…?”

“Just like they give us their blood to feed on, we ‘give’ them our own to lengthen their lifespan. By drinking small quantities of it, they do not become Afflicted but are given longevity beyond that of a standard human. As you will notice the nuns sustain us and we in turn sustain the priests who seem to receive the most benefit out of the whole equation. The ‘Blood Brides’ are convinced that by giving their blood they are assisting in the Lord's work. The priests are the more hands on types.”

We arrived at another large hall where I was quickly secured to peg on the ground and cut on the wrist while the blood I lost was collected into a small ceramic bowl. The Keeper then replaced me on the peg and she too was bled and released
.

After that we returned to my cell where she locked me away again.

“That’s enough excitement for one day,” she said.

“Will I have to do this daily?”

“No, feeding and bleeding are done once a week or depending on the whims of the clergy.”

“Is this what my life is going to be like now? Feeding, bleeding and then returned to this cage to be somebody’s plaything? Let me out! Why won’t you fight them? Why do you stand aside and let all these horrible things happen to us? You should be ashamed to be betraying your own kind like this!” She stared at me with a dead look in her eyes. She heard me but the words went right through her and into the void. I wanted to grab her and dig my fingers into her brain to wake her up or take a bite out of her bony throat. She was one of us, the people that I never knew I belonged to, and yet she didn’t care in the slightest. She stood by and let these disgusting priests use and abuse us under the guise of religion and all under the excuse of having tried and failed.

“You too shall learn to obey in time. The more you fight them, the more they will torture you. The more they will try to shake the Devil from inside you and the more they will enjoy it.” She grabbed my arm through the rusty bar and held it tightly until her knuckles went completely white. She looked straight at me with her pain-filled eyes willing me to understand that it was better her way.

That night I was not visited by a priest but by a nun. Her habit was concealing her face, but I could recognize by her smell that she was the one I had fed on that morning.

“So Jesus said to them, truly, truly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me,”
she was quoting effortlessly and with the confidence of one who believes herself to be on the side of virtue.

“Gospel of John…”

“You know your scriptures, demon.”

“They were my bedtime stories once.”

“The Devil picks his progeny intelligently, I have come to realize.”

“You are well trained in matters of the Devil, sister?”

“I see his work every day.”

“His work?”

“His work and his children, the minions like yourself, who he sends out to pollute the innocent with his evil and his temptation.”

“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: Whom resist stedfast in the Faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world.”

“Precisely, demon! We are ever vigilant and ever sober and have no other thought on this earth than to vanquish your master. You might not realize but by feeding you we are forcing you to take Holy Communion of flesh and blood that is consecrated and clerical. We emulate Christ by giving our flesh and blood and for that we shall reap our rewards in Heaven. Our blood serves to weaken you day by day by putting Christ in your body and slowly pushing the devil out of you. We are making demons the servants of Christ by putting them to work in His name and making them fight their own kind!” Her eyes were open wide and excited as she narrated her dogma. The fervor with which she had been trained was clear to see and it was impressive. I admired people with such unshakable faith willing to soldier on in the name of belief despite the contradictions right before their eyes.

“And how do you explain the fact that more Demons are brought through your gates every year?”

“Do you not see? The Devil is angered by our work and sends more of his minions out to serve him. Our work is so successful that he has to double his efforts to continue sowing mischief and disorder! Only, we capture you and put you to work for the Church and thus the Devil’s men become the workforce of Jesus; the more that are sent the easier our work becomes.”

“And the feeding? Does it not repulse you to have the Devil’s minions touch your unsoiled flesh?”

“I feel the most connected to God when I let you creatures take my blood because I know that’s when His love enters you, and little by little dissolves the evil away. I know that my body is serving to kill Beelzebub and his vile hordes. I am the Conduit of Christ!"

“That’s ironic because I did not feel weak when I took your blood today; I felt powerful and strong and satisfied! I could have ended your life with a few more sips, where would your God have been then?”

“But you didn’t, did you? God protects us even in this hell pit where we are surrounded by fiends. You take my blood because He commands it, and because it elevates
my
soul
. You do not take my blood for your benefit but for that of humanity and Christianity and so that He may live in you and expel the evil! In fact you have no choice but to take my blood and with that you bring about your own destruction. It is poetic in a way that only He could have ordained!”

“You can be certain that the moment I am able I will drink all your blood and leave you dry like cracked mud under the midday sun, and then my father and I shall rejoice.”

“I am not afraid of you, you loathsome creature. Ours is a holy war, fought every day for centuries and with each new sunrise your kind are weakened and ours is strengthened. The Order of the Knights of the True Blood cannot be defeated for scores have tried and failed.”

“I will not fail, I promise you.”

“That is a promise I have heard countless times by demons who have perished due to their insolence and by demons who are still here struggling against us and losing their fight every single day. I see their spirits break and their strength diminish and that’s how I know our good work is successful and that the Lord is pleased,” she announced with a smirk. And with that she departed leaving me to seethe in my anger and frustration, my only relief the fantasies of causing her death alongside Father Eusebios when the time came.

Nine

In my first few weeks in the Keep I attended Latin lessons. Latin served as a unifying language for the tapestry of nations that resided here. Due to my mother’s fervent Catholicism, I was quick to fill the blanks in my knowledge and as soon as I was considered fully able to communicate my Keeper put me to work.

“This is the loom room,” she explained as she took me to my new post. “This is where the Order’s robes are made. In the coming weeks you will be taught how the Order of the Knights of the True Blood works from beginning to end and you will start by learning to weave the fabric they need in order to make the robes they wear.” I was encouraged to sit at a loom and a large guard soon appeared and attached my bracelet to the end of the structure.

Over time I learned to weave the coarse linen robes that the priests and nuns wore and after that I was taken to the dyeing chambers where the fabric was given its distinctive red hue. Just like the weaving factories, the dye house was equally large, and the work grueling and back breaking. The dyeing was followed by sewing the gowns and embroidering them with the Order’s acronym, the insignia they had burnt into my skin on my first day here. A large ‘O’ filled with a ‘K’ merged into a ‘B’ the spine of both of which formed a ‘T’ which also resembled a cross. I have attempted to recreate it below with my modest draftsmanship skills.

Slowly I was taught to embroider it in fine silver thread. A particularly twisted addition to the robes and habits, I thought, as these insane priests took irony and torture to new heights. The thread was made of real silver wire and was particularly hard to use. Trying to sew without touching it was nearly impossible. The fine fiber acted like a blade and seared through my fingers causing pain and cuts as it went along. In time I learned to wrap the tips of my fingers with tiny slivers of fabric, after seeing some of the older ones doing it, which allowed me to do the work without touching the thread. Though cumbersome at first I soon managed to work this way.