*****
Two months prior, with her child slumbering peacefully during the witching hour, the maiden, having not produced so much as a yawn, took a candle for a curious stroll. The countess, who had been at court for many weeks, wouldn’t be around to reprimand her for acts unsuited for someone of her class. She was still enamored by the castle, having never set eyes upon one until the count found her and offered her work and refuge.
Lost in her thoughts, following the flame’s dim light, she could have been mistaken for the countess, in charge of the whole grounds and every living soul on them; maybe even every living soul in Hungary. She stood tall and glided in her steps, until one of their souls cried out, a whimpering sob echoing through cracks of tired stone; a cry too devastating to stay behind a wall for long.
“Some soul, any soul, please!” The voice was stifled and insistent, and with her new motherly instincts, she followed the desperate sound like the tides did the drenching moon; a shadow that could never seem to outrun its master. She pressed her hand to the wooden door, pushed and pulled, and by the force of her delicate, more pertinently desperate hands, it finally opened.
“It’s not her! Thank you, God! I told you He exists!” the voice resonated to her only company for the past few weeks. The maiden squinted through the scene. Her wide eyes adjusted sharply in the dim light. There appeared to be two girls hidden in the depths of the chamber.
The room looked as if it should be a place for atrocious offenders of the law, people who had done unmistakable dirty deeds, left to rot away in their own unjust blood. The maiden wondered how the servant girls, younger than she and decidedly more useful, ended up in this hidden chamber. They did not belong. Who had done this, she wondered.
“Come closer,” A raspy voice said from the shadows.
The maiden obeyed with great regret.
The girls, or what was left of their frail frames, were chained in a corner, their bodies bloody and bruised, clothes torn at the edges by cuts of insanity, as they watched the maiden with wide and youthful eyes. There were numerous torture devices in the room, or she assumed them to be at least. Metallic drops of confetti left well-worn paths on the floor. An overbearing odor of death lingered, reminding all three servants that countless had likely died already and many more deaths would soon follow.
The rumors of hidden bodies and late night transports echoed in the maiden’s memory, near where she would keep this one. Not all stories were real, of course, but most spawned from some sort of truth. Eventually, it would be impossible to keep hiding the bodies, including the two before her, or blame the deaths on nature and accidents, but if the fear of discovery had not stopped the murders, nothing could.
“Please, Miss,” The first shackled shadow said, “I don’t want to go back in there.” Her throat quivered in a gulp, as she nudged her head towards the coffin painted as a woman.
The wandered shifted her candle in the direction of the upright coffin. It was impaled with sharp nails and shards of variously pleasing pointed objects, protruding from its head and belly, and to the foundation of its iron legs. Though the maiden had never seen such a device before, the upright coffin could not have left many survivors. It was a wonder the girl before her had survived it.
She walked cautiously closer towards the girl who spoke. Dried tears stained her cracking, porcelain face as strands of dirty hair stuck into her cuts like salt. Her fingernails were blackened with dry blood, fingers left unable to grasp anything.
“Please, get us out of here!” she pleaded, her voice echoing insistently through the stone cold room, as her feet gave way to melt sluggishly into the sharp cracks of the ground.
The maiden, unable to say much of anything, tried the chains, afraid to touch the girls, as if the torture were contagious. She tried not to look upon their faces again, though the reveal of such blatant savagery would haunt her for the rest of her life. In her dreams, when she woke, and every time she’d take in a breath of air.
“I’m going to need help,” she offered, now shaking, wondering who she could really trust.
“Don’t tell her! She’ll kill you too!” the one with the raspy voice warned, bracing her worn out limbs against the cold wall she could no longer feel.
“Who is she?” the maiden asked, emphasizing the last word.
The tortured girls looked at each other, mirrors of tainted fear, one still confined to the ground, afraid to speak her tormentor’s name loudly or at all.
“Well?”
“Countess Bathory.”