The Best New Horror 3 Page 14

  It was true that the private atrocities that had seemed to flourish in the uneasy Germany of the twenties had no place in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Peter Kürten, Karl Denke, Fritz Haarmann, Georg Grossman—they were not part of the new German Empire. It was only rumour to us that private atrocity had given way to official atrocity, on a scale that made the activities of Elisabeth Bathory seem almost petty.

  (Elisabeth Bathory was a devoted wife to her noble husband, the Count Francis Nadasdy, and a devoted mother to their children. She seemed to have no difficulty in keeping her domestic life quite separate from the bloodlust and magic of her darker nature.)

  “What time do you leave Victoria?”

  “The train’s due out at 9.25 in the morning.”

  “Hell! I’ve got to go to Birmingham tomorrow and I shan’t be back till Friday evening. I can’t even come to see you off. How long do you expect to be away?”

  “No telling. I’m to start at the state archives in Buda-Pestah and then if I can I go on to Elisabeth’s castle in eastern Czechoslovakia and to Vienna, where she had a town house. There’s a special research that Meg wants me to carry out besides just gathering details of the Countess’ life. She’s heard from a correspondent in Austria that a torture device made for the Countess may still exist. I’m to track it down if I can and try to buy it.”

  (Elisabeth Bathory had special torture rooms installed in most of her several houses and castles. She would also indulge herself in private rooms when she visited friends or relatives. In the cellar of her mansion in Vienna was a spiked cage, in which her naked victim would be hauled up on a rope and pulley and prodded with hot irons until she impaled herself in her torment. The beautiful Countess, herself naked, stood beneath the cage bathing in the shower of fresh blood.)

  “Good God! That’s horrible.”

  Valerie shrugged. “Morbid, I agree, but after all, it’s all in the distant past.”

  “You know as well as anyone that Margaret Pennethorne can make the past come alive. I suppose there’s no changing your mind?”

  “Not likely! I’m looking forward to this. It’s a pity we shan’t be able to meet again—but it isn’t the end of the world, you know. I’ll keep in touch, and we’ll get together again as soon as I come back.”

  (After her eventual trial, at which in deference to her noble family she was referred to only as “a blood-thirsty, bloodsucking Godless woman, caught in the act at Csejthe Castle”, Elisabeth Bathory was sentenced to lifelong imprisonment at that same castle. She was immured in a small room without doors or windows, and only a small hatch for food to be passed to her. In August 1614 she died, “suddenly and without a crucifix and without light”. For three and a half years she had seen nobody and nothing.)

  Two weeks later, I happened to meet Margaret Pennethorne in Hatchard’s bookshop. Naturally, I asked whether she’d had word yet from Valerie. Her quizzical smile was unchanged as she shook her head.

  “Aren’t you worried about her at all? I mean, with Europe so volatile—?”

  “Oh, no. She’s a capable enough girl. She’ll cope. Besides, just now I’m rather relieved to have got her off my hands. Protracted love-affairs become tedious, don’t you think?”

  Much later that day I understood her remark. A love affair. They had been lovers. Of course! The notion just hadn’t occurred to me before (didn’t I say that I was a very naïve young man?), but it explained one thing at least. In spite of her obvious and very feminine good looks, I had never been able to think of Valerie in terms of a heterosexual love. Now I knew what it was about her that had precluded such thoughts.

  (Elisabeth Bathory was bisexual, and all her perversities tended toward the lesbian side of her nature. She began by mistreating the peasant girls on her estates, who were in a very real sense her own property. The Hungarian peasants’ revolt of a generation before had been savagely crushed, and the peasants of Elisabeth’s time had no rights—even life itself was merely a privilege. Later she became convinced that only aristocratic virgins could provide the blood she needed. Her preferred victims were under eighteen years of age, blonde and buxom, in contrast to her own dark and slender beauty.)

  A day or so later, the first letter arrived from Valerie, having taken four days in the post. My own feelings towards her were changed only in that they were now quite straightforward: she was and would remain the best friend I had. I read the letter with great interest.

  She had succeeded in gaining admittance to the state archives in Buda-Pesth, and had obtained (helped no doubt by her own charm and Margaret Pennethorne’s money) an abridged transcript of the trial records. This was in Latin, and she intended to spend some of the time while travelling in translating as much of it as she could. Meanwhile, she was now headed for what had recently become the independent state of Slovakia, to visit that same castle of Csejthe which had been the Countess Bathory’s principal residence. All was going well, and she had encountered no difficulties of any sort. Everyone she had met had been kind and helpful. I must stop worrying.

  There was a post-script: “I quite forgot to tell you just what the object is that Meg wants me to try and find. It’s an Iron Maiden.”

  (The Iron Maiden was not a particularly common device even in the great age of torture. The most famous example to be seen today is at Nuremberg, a bulky machine, very crudely shaped like a woman, and with a woman’s face roughly depicted on the head. A section of the front is hinged like a door, and can be opened by means of a rope and pulley to reveal a hollow just large enough for a man to be placed. On the inside of the door are several long spikes, so arranged that when the door closed the upper ones would pierce the victim’s eyes and the lower ones his heart and vitals.)

  Unfortunately, Valerie didn’t tell me where in Slovakia she would be staying, and I was unable to find Csejthe on any map available to me. Later events drove the question from my mind and it was only within the last few years that I learned that the place is now called Cachtice.

  The next letter came about ten days later. Since the postmark was unreadable, I still had no clear notion of just where Valerie was; somehow I felt reluctant to approach Margaret Pennethorne again.

  The castle, itself ruined, stands on a high green hill surrounded by level and fertile country. The late Sir Iain Moncreiffe of That Ilk described it as “like a land-girt St Michael’s Mount”—which is more pithy and probably as accurate as Valerie’s longer description. If there was any local superstition attaching to the place, Valerie doesn’t mention it; she seems to have had no trouble in finding someone to act as a guide. This woman, Anna, was presumably a native Czech speaker, but she had more than a smattering of German—of a sort . . . At least she was able, with little prompting, to show Valerie the very room in which the Bloody Countess had passed so many months in a living death.

  (Elisabeth’s family and that of her husband were Protestants—Calvinists in fact—but enjoyed the support of the Holy Roman Emperor. The estates at Csejthe were not subject to any interference from the Emperor or from the neighbouring Prince of Transylvania. Elisabeth herself was a Calvinist, a complete believer in predestination. As a noble with absolute authority, and a Christian already chosen for salvation, she had no cause to justify her acts to herself or to anyone else. Even when she turned to the devil for help—it was a sorceress who advised her that the blood of noble maidens was necessary—she remained a convinced Christian. One can only wonder whether John Calvin himself would have approved.)

  Anna even told her that the Countess’ house in Vienna had been situated in the Augustienerstrasse, near the Imperial Palace. As to the Iron Maiden—why, the gnädiges Fraülein could hardly expect a poor peasant woman to know much about that. Certainly it had existed at this castle, and she hadn’t heard that it had been destroyed. Maybe it wasn’t there when the authorities came at last to arrest the beautiful Countess. Maybe it had been sent away to one of her other houses. The house in Vienna, perhaps?

  Fortunately, this fitt
ed in nicely with Valerie’s plans, since Margaret Pennethorne’s reticent correspondent had also suggested that the torture machine might have been taken into Austria. As they said goodbye, Anna looked for a moment at Valerie and said (so Valerie thought), “You will find it, I think. You are the right sort.”

  (Elisabeth Bathory was given to torturing her young companions while making the long, slow journey from one house or castle to another. Later, unable to wait until she had reached her destination, she would kill the girls who travelled with her. The bodies were simply interred by the roadside, though in earlier years she had insisted upon a Christian burial for her victims.)

  Even at the Austrian frontier, Valerie encountered no real difficulty. She had to be rather circumspect in writing from Vienna, but I understood that the passport officer, a true Nazi, had been most impressed by her evident Nordic beauty and fluent German. The only thing that slightly disturbed her was that more than once—at the frontier, and again a couple of times before reaching Vienna—she thought she caught a glimpse of the old peasant woman, Anna.

  I never knew Vienna before the war. The only time I’ve spent there was in 1946 as an officer in the British occupation force. Even so, I doubt that my Vienna was any more unlike the city that Elisabeth Bathory knew. I try to put the great neo-classical and baroque structures of the Inner Stadt out of my mind but I find that there’s nothing left. If I’d hoped for some sort of imaginative guidance from Valerie’s letters, I was to be disappointed. A curious and disconcerting vagueness seemed to affect her—she who had always impressed me with the clarity and balance of her thoughts.

  The accounts became at last almost dreamlike. I gathered that for at least a week after her arrival in the city she had more or less wandered around the Inner Stadt, admiring the Hofburg, the Opera House, the churches—and wondering, with a feeling that she couldn’t quite define, whether she would meet Anna again. During these days, she must have passed many times the corner of the Augustienerstrasse and the Dorotheergasse. It didn’t seem to occur to her, though, that there was anything special about the place.

  (Elisabeth Bathory’s mansion stood hard by the Austin Friary. As her blood-lust grew rapidly out of control, she abandoned nearly all rational precautions. The appalling screams of the tortured and dying were so loud that the good friars sometimes protested by hurling pots and pans at her windows.)

  Almost every week brought a letter from Valerie—to which I couldn’t reply, as, infuriatingly, she gave no address. Several times I tried to telephone Margaret Pennethorne, but there was no reply. Valerie knew that there was something particular she ought to be doing, something connected with a person she’d known in England. Or in Hungary. The letters would contain disturbing, almost surrealist, descriptive imagery of a city that was unlike any I had ever encountered. Yet, among these accounts, there were the names and descriptions of recognisable places. And then there were the people.

  Soldiers, German and Austrian, goose-stepping, heel-clicking, saluting. The ominous Heil Hitler that seemed to have replaced the homely Grüss Gott. There was something in the eyes of the men that rather frightened her. All the men. The women, on the other hand . . .

  It was never made clear whether she actually met Anna again but there were many references to her, brief and inconsequential, often questioning. Was her face in every crowd, or could it just be nervous imagination? Was she only one person? But there was no need to pursue that sinister line. Whatever hold Anna might have over her, she could always go to Dorothy for comfort. Dear old Dorothy, so solid and motherlike. Besides, if it hadn’t been for Dorothy—

  Dorothy. Dorothea. Something about the name. Something meaningful?

  If it hadn’t been for Dorothy, she would never have met—

  She was here to find something. Someone.

  —would never have met Mädelein.

  There was that odd, stunted little man who often seemed to be near when she was with Dorothy. She didn’t like the glances he gave her, but at least Mädelein treated him with scornful tolerance. She must do the same. Darling lovely Mädelein.

  The very last letter—like the rest, it was undated, but it reached me on the 21st of June—contains one very clear statement. Valerie was in love. Irrevocably, over head and ears in love. With Mädelein. They had hardly even met—just seen each other in the street; and it was all so proper. Perhaps that was a part of the spell. Nothing that had happened in England (what had happened in England?) had been like this. How wise Dorothy had been to keep them apart at first. Not a word exchanged, but when Mädelein had smiled, showing those beautiful white, even teeth, and her eyes shining the clearest blue, then Valerie knew. She’d found what she was looking for.

  Now, what was I to make of all this? I had been against the journey from the start. Not only was the journey itself unsafe, I thought, but the reason for it was plainly morbid and mentally unhealthy. Was I right? Something had clouded my friend’s mind; I couldn’t doubt that she’d become (the word repels me, but I must use it) insanely obsessed by her mad search and by the mad world in which she’d arrived. Her descriptions of Mädelein in no way eased my mind, for they were clearly descriptions of Valerie herself.

  Again I tried to telephone Margaret Pennethorne. This time, at least, she answered, but it was with a brusque, “Oh, it’s you. Well, you’re Valerie’s friend; perhaps you can tell me where the wretched kid’s got to?”

  “But for heaven’s sake! Isn’t she in Vienna?”

  “You tell me. She’s out somewhere spending my money, and I haven’t had a word from her in weeks.”

  I was horrified. And somehow, I just couldn’t bring myself to mention Valerie’s letters to me, which were the reason why I’d called in the first place. I said something vague about passing on any news that reached me and I put the telephone down.

  Fear for my friend inspired me to boldness. I wrote to the British Embassy in Vienna, explaining that I was very concerned for a young Englishwoman whom I believed to be alone in the city and possibly in some kind of trouble. If someone from the Embassy staff could find her and assure me that she was all right, I should be most grateful.

  The reply came nearly two weeks later.

  The body of Valerie Beddoes, identified by her passport and her belongings, had been found in her room at a small pension near the Rotenturmstrasse. The manageress, having been alarmed by a single dreadful scream from the room, had awoken her husband and one of the male residents and with much reluctance entered the room. When she had realised what the viscous liquid was that her bare feet were treading in, she had become hysterical and had to be sedated. The police were called at once.

  Valerie Beddoes lay upon the floor of the little room, her spine broken and four ribs crushed. She was naked, so that the appalling wounds inflicted upon her could be clearly seen. Her breasts and genitals had been savagely stabbed with some sharp thick instrument like a chisel.

  The police surgeon declared that he had come across nothing like it in Viennese criminal history. He could only compare it to the Whitechapel murders of 1888. Plainly it was Lustmördern, the work of a sexual psychopath. The coroner could only agree. Despite the landlady’s stories of visitors to the young woman’s room that night, whom she was unable to describe in any detail—even to being unsure of their number—it was plain that these visitors were women, and neither coroner nor police could credit that this horrible act was the work of a woman. The verdict was: murder by person or persons unknown.

  It was all so sad, said the landlady; the English girl had been a little vague, perhaps, but so sweet and so very pretty.

  The person or persons remained unknown. As soon as I felt able to, I sent a copy of the letter from the Embassy to Margaret Pennethorne. I expected no reply, and received none. Nor did I hear again from Vienna.

  On the 3rd of September, Great Britain declared war against Germany. My time and thoughts were occupied for a long while with other matters, and when I returned at last to civilian life I delibe
rately put Valerie’s death from my mind, preferring to remember our friendship and the good times. The wound healed, though it ached horribly at times.

  And now it has opened again, all because of a suspicious voice that will not be silenced.

  Over fifty years ago, I considered Valerie’s pursuit of a sadistic murderess to be morbid and unhealthy. I think so still. For that reason I made no attempt to research further into the blood-soaked career of the Countess Elisabeth Bathory. Only Valerie mattered, and Valerie was dead. My only link with her had been Margaret Pennethorne, the enigmatic “Richard Border”, and she was dead too, killed in the Blitz. So it was chance and not design that led me to realise that I’d made a false assumption all those years ago.

  The Iron Maiden. The thing that Valerie had been looking for. Quite recently I discovered that the machine made for Elisabeth Bathory, to her own specifications (and which almost certainly was destroyed after her arrest at Csejthe), had been something rather different from the crude device preserved at Nuremberg. It was made in the form of an attractive and shapely young woman, life-sized and naked, complete with full breasts and pubic hair. The blue eyes could open and close, and the pink lips part to reveal even white teeth. The flowing blonde hair was real and so were the teeth—they had been torn from the head of one of Elisabeth’s victims. When the chosen subject, who must have looked like its living image, approached this hellish doll, its arms would enfold her in an embrace, at first amusing, swiftly bone-crushing. Meanwhile, from the genitals and the nipples, sharp spikes would spring to pierce the young woman’s body.

  I thought then that Valerie’s mind had become clouded, and that “Mädelein” was merely a narcissistic projection of her own self. I think otherwise now, since I have discovered that “Mädelein”, literally translated, is a diminutive of “Mädel”—a maid.

  Valerie Beddoes did find what she was looking for after all . . .

  S. P. SOMTOW