Blood Ritual Read online

  Table of Contents

  A selection of titles by Sarah Rayne

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Epilogue

  A selection of titles by Sarah Rayne

  DEVIL’S PIPER*

  THORN: AN IMMORTAL TALE*

  THE BURNING ALTAR*

  CHANGELING: AN IMMORTAL TALE*

  WILDWOOD: AN IMMORTAL TALE*

  PROPERTY OF A LADY

  THE SIN EATER

  *Originally published under the pseudonym of Frances Gordon

  BLOOD RITUAL

  Sarah Rayne

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in 1994 by

  HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

  a division of Hodder Headline PLC

  338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH

  eBook edition first published in 2012 by Severn House Digital an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 1994 Bridget Wood

  The right of Bridget Wood to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0066-2 (epub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  Author’s Note

  The remarkable story of the Hungarian countess, Elizabeth Bathory, who lived at the end of the sixteenth century in the territories bordering Transylvania, is as blood-drenched as -if less well known than – the famous Dracula myth. But it exists nonetheless.

  I did not invent Elizabeth. She lived and died precisely as I have set out in the sixteenth-century sections of this book. Her story has come down to the present day in fragments: mostly from the archives of the Court of Vienna where, because of their horrendous content, the documents relating to her life and death were kept under lock and key for more than a century. It was not until the early part of the eighteenth century that these documents were discovered by a Jesuit Father, who pieced together much of her story.

  Elizabeth Bathory came of a wild and lawless lineage, sprinkled here and there with unmistakable insanity, but it is impossible to know at this distance whether she was mad – a psychopath or sexual sadist in today’s terms – or whether she was one of the genuinely evil people who litter the pages of history.

  During her life, Elizabeth Bathory terrorised the country-side surrounding her bleak remote castles, and her hunting ground was close to that of Bram Stoker’s famous blood-quaffing villain. She was dazzlingly beautiful, prodigiously cruel and possessed of a consuming vanity which drove her to worship strange and dark gods. Her acts of barbarism and the accounts of the torture chambers she set up to commit her butchery read like the most extreme kind of horror fiction.

  But I have not exaggerated any one of them.

  Acknowledgements

  Source books make tedious reading for what is primarily intended as a work of fiction and entertainment, and research for a book of this nature is necessarily diverse. However, I should wish to pay particular tribute to the following, all of which have been of immense help and enlightenment in uncovering a little of Elizabeth Bathory’s strange life:

  THE BLOODY COUNTESS (Calder & Boyars), by Valentine Penrose, translated from the French by Alexander Trocchi, which in its turn acknowledges the work of the Jesuit Father, Laszlo Turoczki, who discovered the minutes of Elizabeth Bathory’s trial, and published his monograph on her in 1744.

  THE BOOK OF WEREWOLVES (Causeway Books), by Sabine Baring-Gould.

  WITCHCRAFT (George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd.), by William Seabrook.

  My grateful thanks are also due to:

  My brother, Tony Duggan, for ‘Tranz’.

  Medical friends for their valuable contributions.

  For G.F

  from F.G

  Chapter One

  If Michael could have been sure that the nightmare scene he had glimpsed before he was blinded had been nothing more than a grotesque illusion, he might never have returned to Romania.

  But the vision had stayed stubbornly with him: the ruined castle deep in the Carpathian mountains; the long table set for a feast, with the eerily beautiful creatures, some of them like living corpses propped up around it; the flickering candles reflecting in the smoky, smeary mirrors . . .

  He had not yet grown accustomed to the loss of his sight and he thought he never would become accustomed. He would certainly be damned if he would accept as a dream the sinister vision that had printed itself on his mind with such remarkable clarity. Dr Forbes, with his kindly, faintly impersonal voice, said that the mind was a strange thing. There could be no vision, of course, but there was what the medical profession called ‘phantom limb syndrome’. Pain or irritation in an amputated foot or leg. Perhaps this was a little like that?

  Whatever had struck Michael on the head, resulting in severe retinal detachment, had not been a phantom. Probably it had been a Serb mercenary a bit off-course. Maybe the small camera crew had even been followed across Hungary and into Romania, though that was rather a sinister idea. Probably it had only been a tramp. Ruins in Romania were as full of tramps and gypsies as anywhere else in the world. Michael had not been expecting to be attacked; he had not even been thinking about it, although they had all grown accustomed to watching for snipers. He had been trying to get footage of some of the refugee settlements which were springing up, and which people in England would watch on Channel Four’s seven o’clock news, eating their suppers and saying, How terrible;
wasn’t it Hitler marching into Poland all over again? There was nothing new in the world.

  And it was a hard thing if, out of all of the marvellous, shining things he had seen in thirty-five years, he had to be left with a horror film-flash, a hammed-up Sixties Bram Stoker story. He supposed it served him right. You read the books and you saw the films and enjoyed the frisson. But it was a cruel joke if this was all he would have left of the world.

  It was Hammer horror at its tackiest. Michael had seen the films at Oxford: there had been a revival, and it had been the thing to do, that autumn term. It had usually been a good way of getting the girl of the evening into bed.

  But he did not want to remember sex any more than he wanted to remember horrors. He supposed that sex was a thing of the past for him – who would want to make love to a blind man? – and as for horrors, hadn’t there been horrors to spare during the weeks in Romania and what was left of Bosnia? Anyone who had seen the refugees pouring out of the towns in droves, keening and dragging their tragic carts and bundles of belongings, or the soul-searing pictures of Romanian orphanages and Serb baby farms had plenty of stored-up memories without resorting to candlelit banquets in ruined castles. Michael would never have done so, even in the days when he had all of his sight and most of his wits . . . In the days when he could drive cars and watch sunsets and look at paintings and read Proust if he wanted to.

  He would never drive cars or watch sunsets now, although some of the good things were left: Mozart was left. And Bach and Schubert. He could thank some kind of Providence for that. He supposed that Braille books were left as well. But everything else was gone.

  Zoe was certainly gone.

  He had not expected her to stay faithful. He had not wanted it. You could not offer much when you had lost your sight in a ruined castle, never mind who it was who had smashed you over the head.

  Zoe had been entirely charming about abandoning him to his fate because Zoe was entirely charming about everything. She had held his hand and said, with nicely judged regret, that it was the greatest tragedy ever, poorest Michael, but there was talk of a winter in Switzerland – someone had rented a house there, and then they might all go to Istanbul for a few weeks which was not an opportunity to miss. And Jamie and Alex were restoring an old farmhouse in the Loire country and had asked her to visit them, immense fun.

  He had been able to feel the light butterfly mind far more vividly than when he could see, and he had made one of those angry dismissive gestures because he had wanted her to be gone; he had wanted them all to be gone.

  ‘Intolerant and impatient,’ Sister Hilary said, coming in later.

  ‘Me or her?’ It still felt odd to speak into the darkness. Forbes had said that Michael would begin to hear resonances in his own voice that he had not heard before. The power of hearing would become heightened. A compensation for the blindness. Michael had found this unbelievably depressing, because it prophesied a permanency. But now he said, ‘Me or her?’ and waited for Sister Hilary to take his hand, which was something they all did in here before they spoke to you. Hilary’s hands were not soft and looked-after as Zoe’s were; they were strong and scrubbed and capable.

  ‘You, of course,’ said Hilary. ‘Intolerant of your lady.’

  ‘She isn’t my lady any longer. It’s stretching it a bit to call her a lady anyway.’

  ‘Were you to be married?’

  ‘Good God, what a dreadful idea!’ said Michael savagely. ‘Being married to Zoe would be fifty different kinds of hell.’

  He waited to see what she would say, but she only said, ‘Impatient of everyone, still.’ She smelt of the plain hospital soap when she leaned over him, but there was a light drift of something else. Michael, considering, thought it was something old-fashioned like lavender or gillyflower essence. What the hell did gillyflower essence smell of anyway?

  What was somebody who had such a warm, ironical sense of humour and such held-in-check rebelliousness doing inside a convent?

  Hilary listened carefully to the discussion in Dr Forbes’s room about Michael Devlin. It had been unexpected to be included like this: Sister Veronica was not given to including the younger nuns in consultations, especially when it was Dr Forbes, who fluttered her. When Hilary had first come to St Luke’s, she had not expected to find that nuns were fluttered by men.

  But she sat quietly and listened to Dr Forbes telling them how there was nothing more they could do for Mr Devlin.

  ‘All of the usual treatments for bilateral detachment have been tried,’ he said. ‘And after so long – a year, is it?’

  ‘A year, Doctor.’

  ‘Well, after a year, I’m inclined to think the damage won’t be reversed.’ He paused, frowning. ‘But there’s something he might consider.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Laszlo Istvan in Austria has had some remarkable successes with this degree of retinal damage. It’s rather a long shot, of course. It’s rather a long way for him to go, as well.’

  ‘Austrian?’ said Sister Veronica, a bit suspiciously.

  ‘Viennese, actually.’

  ‘That would mean travelling.’

  ‘Devlin is not a poor man,’ said Dr Forbes.

  Mr Devlin was quite wealthy by the Order’s standards, but Hilary thought that by many worldly standards his means were probably no more than modest.

  ‘And unfortunately,’ said Dr Forbes, ‘there is no employer who could help. In so many cases, there are compensation payments. But Mr Devlin was a freelance. He was working on a documentary programme telling how widespread the Yugoslav conflict had become. How far-reaching its effects were, and tracing how far some of the Bosnian homeless had managed to travel.’

  ‘“Stone in a Pool”,’ said Hilary, without thinking.

  ‘Ah, you know.’

  ‘He was preparing it when he was blinded.’

  ‘Yes. Well, there’s no reason to suppose he couldn’t pay Istvan’s fees,’ said Dr Forbes. ‘And there’s no medical reason why he can’t travel. He has his wits and his strength.’

  ‘He could not travel alone.’

  ‘No, not yet,’ said Dr Forbes, and then, shooting one of his sudden, penetrating looks at Sister Veronica from beneath his thick grey eyebrows, ‘But he could stay in your Viennese House perhaps. For the consultation with Istvan, and for recuperation afterwards. It would be a kind of halfway house until he can cope properly with the world again. Sighted or blind.’

  Sister Veronica got ready to say that St Luke’s was not a charity but Dr Forbes said, ‘Of course, the Order would render its usual account. You aren’t a charity, Sister.’ Hilary suppressed a grin.

  ‘Would he stay in a religious house? He is not,’ said Sister Veronica, a touch acerbically, ‘especially devout.’ This was plainly a reference to the afternoon when Michael had been trying to master the intricacies of Braille with Hilary, and had lost his temper and hurled the cards across the room and given vent to a string of curses just as Sister Veronica was making her stately rounds.

  ‘He was recommended to us by the monks of Glenstal,’ said Dr Forbes, and Sister Veronica at once said, ‘Oh, then he’s Irish,’ as if this accounted for a good deal.

  ‘His parents were Irish, although he was born in this country, I believe,’ said Dr Forbes, and Hilary thought: yes, of course he is Irish. And wondered why she had not realised it before. It accounted for the untidy black hair and the wide, mobile mouth. It accounted for the hot temper and the impatience, and the flashes of quite disgraceful charm that occasionally surfaced. And his eyes were the clear blue of the tempestuous western sea that lashed Ireland’s wild beautiful coast . . . His eyes . . .

  ‘And I thought,’ said Dr Forbes, carefully, ‘that since Sister Hilary has been tutoring him, and since he seems to respond better to her than to anyone, she should accompany him to Vienna.

  ‘If,’ he said urbanely, ‘you would permit.’

  Michael listened carefully to the suggestion. Not something to become too op
timistic about, said Forbes, seating himself in the narrow canvas-seat chair so that it creaked in the heavier way it creaked for large people. Not something to pin too many hopes on, he said, and Michael heard the frown. With such a severe degree of retinal detachment the prognosis was not good.

  ‘But in your case, I would be inclined to try,’ he said.

  ‘What would it mean?’

  ‘More or less the same procedures we’ve tried here. Laser surgery of course. And Laszlo Istvan has had some remarkable successes with your particular condition.’ He paused. ‘You do know that it was a very severe degree of damage,’ he said.

  ‘And therefore,’ said Michael, sardonically, ‘whatever is done now can hardly make matters worse.’

  ‘You were lucky in many ways,’ said Forbes after a moment. ‘Such a severe blow to the head could have resulted in worse things than blindness. Brain damage. Amnesia or personality change. Visible trauma to skull or cheekbones . . .’ He paused. ‘You are unmarked.’

  ‘Is that intended to make me feel better?’

  ‘It might in time.’ Forbes rustled his papers. ‘The sisters thought you could stay in their Viennese House,’ he said. ‘It’s a similar set-up to this one and it would be quite a sensible arrangement. In a conventional hospital or an hotel there would be a number of difficulties for you. Laszlo Istvan has his own clinic, of course, where there could certainly be a room—’

  ‘But it would be expensive,’ finished Michael.

  ‘Yes. I don’t know your exact circumstances—’

  ‘I’m not sure I have any,’ said Michael angrily. ‘I daresay the State has to look after cripples of all kinds. I suppose I qualify as a cripple.’

  ‘To allow yourself to become a dependant of the State would be a great waste,’ said Forbes severely. ‘You have been spoken of to me as highly gifted. There must be a great many fields still open to you.’

  ‘I can scarcely be gifted without my sight.’

  ‘I believe that the Viennese convent is an ancient and rather lovely place,’ said Forbes, gently. ‘It would be as good a place for you to learn the world again as any.’