House of Bathory(5)
When the sound of Jane’s Audi had faded away, Betsy noticed how Daisy’s shoulders relaxed.
“I want you to get a notebook,” Betsy said, “and keep it beside your bed. So you can write down your dreams.” Her patient was talking, now it was time to move ahead.
“What for?”
“Dreams are the bridge to your unconscious mind. Your strongest urges, hopes, and fears often make an appearance while your conscious mind sleeps. I mentioned this at our first session, but…”
“But what?”
“You were so—nonresponsive. Now it’s time to start working in earnest. The progress we make starts with your wanting to communicate. You’re ready now.”
The girl shrugged her bony shoulders and studied the toe of her boot.
“Whatever,” she mumbled.
Betsy asked her to write down any previous dreams that she could remember. “And particularly epic dreams. The ones that seem to go on and on like a movie, rather than just short scenes.”
“Why? Why are dreams so important?”
“Dream interpretation is a basic principle of Jungian psychology. Your dreams provide clues to your unconscious mind.”
Daisy nodded her head. The canine tooth suddenly flashed in a smile.
“And nightmares?” she asked, her voice low. “You want me to write about those, too?”
“Especially nightmares, Daisy.”
The girl ran her tongue under her lip. “This Jung guy sounds interesting. Dreams, nightmares? Creepy.”
The psychologist nodded. “Dreams are an open portal to your unconscious mind.”
“And—how about your soul?”
“Well, yes. Jung believed that. But my goal is to help you discover mental health.”
“And what haunts me, right?”
“Your unconscious struggles, yes.”
Daisy nodded slowly, her hair obscuring her face.
“Cool,” she whispered.
Chapter 2
ČACHTICE CASTLE
SLOVAK BORDER OF ROYAL HUNGARY
OCTOBER 31, 1610
Only the palest wash of light seeped through the arrow loopholes in the stone fortress. Winding her way up the turret stairs, Zuzana carried a candle, lighting the torches along the icy walls. The sudden flames sent rats slinking into the dark, their mean chatter echoing in the frigid air.
A cat pounced, seizing a rat by its neck. Zuzana’s startled gasp cast a cloud of vapor that slowly faded above her head. The cat gave a low growl, dragging its squeaking prey into the shadows.
Cats everywhere. A plague of cats! But all the cats the witch Darvulia brought could never rid the castle of vermin. What matter? Zuzana was late in the preparations for her mistress’s morning toilette. The girl shivered in the cold Slovak dawn. She hugged her coarse wool shawl closer to her body, her fingers chilled raw and aching.
The servants’ door to the Countess’s dressing room opened grudgingly. Zuzana heard the stirring of the bedcovers and linens in the bedroom beyond. She cursed herself for falling back asleep after the horrid dream that had left her choking and gasping for breath like a carp on dry land. Even as her eyes snapped open, she still saw the castle walls awash in blood. She had struggled to regain her breath, the red gore slowly fading to gray stone once more.
She kissed the tiny crucifix around her neck. Her chapped lips moved silently in prayer.
Zuzana was the only handmaiden Countess Erzsebet Bathory had brought from Sarvar Castle in Lower Hungary, but she was never allowed to enter the inner bedchamber. She was obliged to keep to the frigid corridor and the dressing room. For Zuzana that was a blessing, God’s intercession that spared her from crossing the evil threshold, and every night she whispered a prayer of thanks.
Some of the Slovak women teased her about her exclusion from the bedchamber with its plastered walls and silk tapestries. Zuzana could not enter, they said, because the Countess could not bear to see the handmaiden’s scarred face upon waking.
“A nocny in the morning light, when the sun should chase away the demons of darkness!” mocked the big-bosomed Hedvika.
Nocny. Nightmare. The village handmaidens called her “nightmare” in their poor and heavily accented German. They spoke only Slovak, not a word of Hungarian, but the Countess suffered them. The ones who did not sleep on straw pallets in the castle made the long walk up from the village before dawn, their cloaks pulled tight against the winter snows, wary of the amber-eyed wolves that lurked in the darkness.
Čachtice Castle perched high on a rocky mountainside, surrounded by the wild borderlands of embattled Royal Habsburg Hungary, hard against the Ottoman territories to the east. Too often the acrid smell of gunpowder and scorched land scented the morning air, carried from the battlefields beyond.