Authors: Romina Nicolaides
When the Countess came back she had that distant look in her eye again but said nothing. She grabbed Kati by the hand and headed for what appeared to be the back wall of the room. Pushing against one of the bricks, a hidden doorway opened wide like a mouth and revealed a passage deep within the castle walls which linked to further hidden corridors. These secreted arteries artfully connected all the rooms of the castle and offered protection from prying eyes. Kati followed the Countess with trepidation as she headed down the stairs but as soon as she realized where she was being taken she froze on the spot prompting the Countess to turn around and hiss at her.
“For once do exactly as you’re told, girl!”
“Yes mistress,” muttered Kati, tears flowing down her cheeks. In the blink of an eye her life had completely been transformed and she was barely allowed stop and take it all in.
“And you will do well to remember these back passages. Only I know the way around them, and I will not hold your hand every time. For your sake, learn fast.” Arriving at the basement Erzsébet led Kati to one of the cages which had a new girl inside. She opened the door, pushed Kati in and locked the door behind her. Kati thought that she too was about to be killed and she began to shiver, not with cold but with fear. Instead of beating her, however, the Countess commanded, “Bite her, bite her like I bit you yesterday. Drink her blood but stop after thirty breaths.” Kati looked at the girl and felt her blood run cold as she understood she would have to hurt her. She was still hungry and felt the urge to bite her, but she was also apprehensive. Looking back at Erzsébet she could hear the Countess breathing faster than usual and glaring at her with that glimmer of green.
“Don’t make me regret my decision to spare you,” she warned and with that Kati grabbed the prisoner by the hair, exposed her neck and before she could finish saying, "Please don’t,” bit into her neck and drank as much blood as she could in thirty breaths.
As the viscous liquid entered her mouth, she felt its warmth fill her with life, sustenance, energy, magic. The dark elixir washed through her entire body and as she drank she got a sense of who the girl was; an air of her personality, her emotions and brief glimpses of her life, like she was drinking part of her soul. She wanted to continue but remembered the Countess’s warning and stopped.
“Did you feel that?”
“Yes mistress,” said Kati as she basked in the vitality she had just gorged on, dropping the limp but still living body.
“Good! Now don’t concern yourself with her. She’ll be alright, these peasant girls have a lot more stamina than they appear. If you didn't drink too much she will neither die nor change.”
“Yes mistress,” said Kati somewhat perplexed by what appeared to be concern for others from the Countess.
“Excellent! Now
that
, my dear girl, is the essence of your Affliction. We are different from other people. We are superior and celestial! Do you know how nobility are divinely ordained? Or at least people like to think they are? Well,
we
are even better than that! We’ve been touched by God’s magic; we are demigods!” She was saying this with that distant expression again and the green glimmer in her eye returned once more. “Some call us children of the Devil, but I believe we are blessed with a magical gift that the Eternal Mother has bestowed upon us. Every day I uncover more and more secrets about our Affliction but my time is limited, which is why you will be my assistant.”
“I thought you said we live a very long time?” said Kati, half expecting to get a beating for her impudence.
“We do, but sadly we do not live forever. I am trying to change that however, and I believe I am close to making us immortal.” Leaning closely into Kati’s face her expression became serious, “I had other assistants before you and they all disappointed me.”
The other girls Bianca mentioned?
“Make sure not to do the same. You’ve been given an invaluable gift and I expect you to cherish it, and serve me well…” Kati nodded with a terrified expression on her face, her eyes wide open. “Now go back to your room and rest some more, you are still changing and need the time to adjust. I will come for you when you’ve woken again.”
Kati was stunned. In the blink of an eye she’d experienced firsthand everything the Countess had written about in her journals. Her green eyes, which she did not try to hide so much anymore, her changed condition, her thirst for blood. This was what it
really
felt like. What it was like to be the Countess. At that moment she collapsed on the ground and wholeheartedly regretted ever leaving her home. She was in the service of this mad woman who’d done some sort of magic on her and forced her to drink human blood. She felt disgusted with herself, disgusted for doing it and disgusted for liking it, "Oh God, please forgive me,” she repeated into her hands as she cried and cried.
I should have left when I found out about all this, I should have just disappeared, but the old man made me stay
and now I’m a beast!
Why did I listen to him?
She cried for so long she was exhausted and without realizing she fell asleep where she sat.
When she woke up she realized that she’d been left to find her own way out of the dark bowels of the castle. To anyone else this would’ve been a daunting task, but her animal instincts were beginning to sharpen. She could smell a log fire in the draft and she could also see the tiniest glimmer of light from under a doorway somewhere.
She found her room and closed the secret door behind her, relieved to be out of there. The passages were warm and damp and stank of rot.
Wood rot? Flesh rot?
The transition from wall to door was virtually imperceptible, like healed skin after it’s been cut with a fine blade. Unless you looked closely enough, you’d never know the scar was there. She wondered what else had been right under her nose all along and she hadn’t known about it. She washed her face and hands in the bucket of water next to the fireplace and got into her bed as far under the covers as she could bury herself.
Eighteen
The next day Kati woke up feeling rested and considerably stronger. It was late afternoon and the dim light coming in through the closed shutters hurt her eyes a lot more than light of this intensity should have done. She quickly got up and pulled the curtains tightly before returning to her bed. Everything appeared much louder and her lips and nose felt more sensitive. She recognized smells that had always been there but which had never smelled so strongly in the past. The wood in the basket by the fireplace was freshly cut and smelled a little damp. There was a dead mouse on the floor underneath a loose stone. The pair of shoes in the corner had dried dung on them from days earlier, the maid sweeping the corridor had just had sex and a large boisterous fly was caught in a spiderweb in some adjacent room. She closed her eyes instinctively to see if she could take all this in but realized she didn't need to. It was registering quickly and effortlessly giving her a three dimensional impression of her surroundings unlike anything she’d experienced before. Then the door opened and the Countess walked in.
“Put your shoes on, and this hood, and come with me.” She didn’t need to ask how Báthory had known she was awake, if her senses were anything like Kati's barely blossoming abilities she would have known the minute Kati opened her eyes if she chose to listen.
After what seemed like hours of following the Countess’s steps in the black linen hood which smelled strongly of camphor, masking everything else beyond it, they came to a remote part of the forest. Grabbing the hood off Kati’s head as well as some hair along with it, she said, “In the castle sensing is easy. You need to tell me what is happening around us right here.
Everything
. Begin!” Indeed the smells and sounds of the forest were so much more concentrated than they’d ever been before, a tightly woven tapestry of fragrance and stench, harmony and cacophony, bitter and sweet; it was horrible but also delicious. “Wood, wet leaves, droppings," breathed Kati.
“Obvious answers, keep going.”
“A frog, a fire, water…?” The Countess was growing impatient and shot her a look with the green glint in her eyes, which only seemed to come out when she couldn't control her rage. It was a beautiful color but it signaled alert to Kati. She shut her eyes and concentrated. “There are some slowly drying rabbit droppings by your feet, a nest full of fresh eggs in that branch that are still warm, a fox is feasting on the carcass of a still bleeding fawn four trees away. There is a frog on a stump approximately thirty-seven paces from here and a fire is burning up-wind perhaps a quarter of a mile away,” she said hoping desperately to impress. Truth was, she was improving quickly. She could smell all these things and she could taste them clearly in her mouth. She could have gone on and described how the fawn’s blood was so inviting and how there were fish eggs in a stream nearby but was unable to describe it because in her unafflicted life she’d had no means of comparison to what fish eggs in water smelled like. These sensations were all so new and even though she’d been raised in close proximity to nature, it was still more than she knew how to put into words.
“That’s a good start,” said the Countess. “For a minute I thought you were going to be as useless as the last one and I would have to kill you too, but you are quickly improving.”
Kati’s pulse raced at the realization that she’d just played for her life, and won. For now.
“You have good survival instincts, I like that about you. Now put your hood back on, go thirty paces down this way and then find your way back to the castle. If you feel the need to feed there are plenty of large animals around to kill, but their blood is not as good as the human stuff. Oh, and one more thing. If you’re foolish enough to return to your mother like a frightened child, or even more foolish and decide to disappear, know that I will hunt you down, find you and kill you. Both of you. I will first drink your mother’s blood while you watch and then I will unleash my rage on you.” She said bringing her face so close to Kati’s that she could smell her fetid breath. Kati opened her eyes wide as her breathing quickened involuntarily, and just nodded in terrified agreement.
“Good,” said the Countess before becoming one with the darkness and vanishing.
Kati had no idea where she was but she realized that like that first night in the corridors this was another exercise in finding her way back using her new abilities. She knew that she was really far from the castle for there were no familiar smells or sounds around. The fact that she was all alone in the middle of God-knows-where frightened her, there could be anyone out here and for a brief time she felt extremely vulnerable. She felt cold, wet and dreadfully exposed in this massive forest filled with so much more than she’d ever been aware of. Instinctively, she looked at the sky to find Venus. As a child she’d spent hours gazing at the big shiny star and had learned to use it as a point of orientation when she'd wandered off. On locating it she headed in what she hoped was the right direction. As she walked she realized, just as the Countess had said, that her body’s makeup had changed to something better than before.
If I can smell fire a quarter of a mile away then surely I can sense any oncoming danger. I can see far better in the dark than I ever did and I can hear practically everything
.
Some time into her walk she started to feel hungry, in fact, this was a hunger that she felt all the time since she’d been bitten. It was a hunger that rose from her deepest core and which was so strong she felt it all over her body. She realized that the meal she’d had the day before had not gone anywhere near satisfying her primitive hunger. The food was satisfying but nothing like when she’d drunk from the prisoner. She remembered the taste of her blood. It was so good she could practically still taste it.
The rabbit never knew what hit it. One minute it was on the ground, but the second it wiggled its nose she grabbed it in an instantaneous death grip. At that moment she realized that she could also see the heat living animals gave off in the darkness. She greedily bit into its neck and as she drank she looked around and watched all the other little shiny forms slowly moving in the dark. When it was empty she dropped it like the useless drinking vessel it had become. Animal blood had none of the finesse of human blood and no impressions either. Having satiated her stomach only partially, she continued walking.
Kati knew the area relatively well. The star guided her back to familiar territory and from there the smells and sounds made her return simple enough. By dawn she was back. Despite the warning, she wondered what would’ve really happened if she’d gone to her mother’s house, collected her and then disappeared, but in her heart of hearts she knew that was no longer a possibility. Instead she went to the old man’s house.
It was late and she knew he would be asleep but she was beyond caring. She knocked on his door several times until she sensed him move around inside mumbling to himself.
“Who is it?” He sounded frightened.
“Katalina, let me in!” Her tone was commanding.