Shot Through The Heart (Supernature Book 1) (8 page)

"She's a strange one and no mistaking," said John.

"What makes you say that?" asked Mark,

"Just something about the place," said John. "I drop a live sheep off at the castle every other week."

"You're joking?" asked Mark.

John shook his head. "God's honest truth," he said. "It's been a standing order since the 1800s, I think. They've got their own butchery in there, one of her sons-in-law is a butcher by trade."

Mark frowned. "Seems a bit odd," he said. "There's a lot of meat on a sheep."

"There's eight of them in there, though," said John. "There's enough variety between the various cuts on a sheep plus the fish they'll get out of the loch, especially this time of year."

Mark shook his head. "Unbelievable," he said. He pulled up Kay's photo on his phone. "I never quite got round to asking last night, but do you recognise her?" He held the phone up.

"Aye," said John. "Young Kay. She was a game lass and no mistake. I saw her getting stuck into the students a couple of times. The girls weren't too happy."

"What do you mean by getting stuck into?" asked Mark. "I thought they were married?"

John laughed. "Who knows what they get up to on that bloody island," he said. "Could be anything."

Mark nodded. "I'll maybe speak to Lady Ruthven next time I see her," he said.

"Och, not you as well," said John. "I'd keep away from her if I were you."

"Thanks for the advice," said Mark, wondering if he should take it or not.

The students got up and left, looking warily at John.

John threw the rest of his whisky down his neck. "Right," he said. "Can't linger around tonight. Just that game of dominoes with the boys and that's it for me. Early start tomorrow." He got up and left Mark to the rest of his pint and his thoughts.

He really needed to ask Elizabeth about Kay again.

"Mark, I'm sorry," said Sarah, "I'm just really tired and I need to go to bed. Beth's finally gone down and she's been an absolute nightmare."

"Okay," said Mark. "Did you take her to the doctor?"

"Thanks for remembering," she said. He could almost hear her smile. "I took her today. She's got an allergy."

"One in the plus column for Dr Google," said Mark.

"He's told me to cut down the amount of dairy I eat," said Sarah. "I'm going to miss my milk but it's only for another few months till I stop breastfeeding." She yawned.

Mark smiled. "Have a nice sleep," he said.

"You too."

Sitting on the bed, Mark ended the call and looked across his lonely hotel room. The desk was already a pigsty, full of his papers and other odds and sods, including the sheets from Kay's room that he'd managed to acquire.

The biggest weight on the desk was the unwritten words, the tens of thousands that he hadn't committed to his word processor yet. It was all sculpted out but, if his PhD had taught him anything, it was that he just could not stick to a structure, finding the tangents and divergences far too tempting, like a magpie heading after something shiny.

It had taken eighteen drafts of the thesis to get something that at least hung together from start to finish and then another five drafts to bash that into a readable shape. He'd left it for a month or so while he sat and played a computer game called
Starcraft
, pretending to the rest of the world that he was working hard.

Sarah's PhD had been much easier - she'd structured it out, tweaked and played with that for a few weeks while Mark racked up word count down at the granular level. She'd finished two years ahead of Mark, and she'd been the breadwinner for those two years while he mucked about with his word count. And
Starcraft
.

When he went back to his own final draft, he discovered that what he'd ended up with was surprisingly good. It just took some minor corrections and then he was finished - that month of hiding away had helped his brain reconfigure itself to acknowledge that he was actually pretty good at this stuff. His tutor had loved it - it had been peer-reviewed and then posted in countless online resources.

Usually, most PhDs would largely be ignored - like Sarah's had been - but Mark's quickly became the vanguard of a new wave of popular history books, itself a solid history of the Clan McLeod. The offer to publish it came through pretty quickly - extend it, refine it, but keep the essence. He managed to keep to the extended outline, just, but mainly through a punitive risk/reward system on the contract.

It sold well.

Then the second one came along, the expansion of a tertiary hypothesis of the PhD into a full-length book about the Highland Clearances, something that he figured would be easy to fix and get out there. Having two books published would be good - if not for his bookshelf, then for his bank balance.

He was drowning.

He had learned a big lesson, though - do your research in advance, and get the structure nailed down. He had now spent two years on research and structure, and the money was running out as quickly as the pages in his notebook, and nowhere near being adequately replaced by the trickle of royalties from the first book.

The laptop looked up at him, its blank screen making him feel guilty - he needed to get the word count racked up. He was just about there with the structure, but he needed to get the words done. Writing a book like this was a marathon - he needed stamina.

He shut the laptop and tidied up his notes into piles. Most of them he'd now processed, typing them up or transcribing the interviews into his laptop, but there was still a lot of admin to get through.

He picked up the bag of comics from Buffy's shop and went back to lie on the bed. He looked at the
Blade
trade paperbacks and just didn't feel ready for a punk vampire killer. The local one that Buffy had pushed on him was all that remained - that or a Norwegian crime thriller he was wading through.

The story sprawled across forty-two pages, with a text section at the back - unlike American comics, there were mercifully few adverts, especially for products that you couldn't even import to the UK.

The story fascinated him from the outset - it was about Elizabeth Bathory, the so-called Blood Countess. Bathory was a daughter of Hungarian nobility in the 1500s - there was a cute touch near the start which showed one of her ancestors fighting alongside Vlad the Impaler, more famously known as Count Dracula.

The comic portrayed her early life with sympathy - she suffered from a severe form of epilepsy. The doctor character in the comic suggested it was a result of inbreeding - Mark very much doubted that such a view would have been expressed at the time, even if the scientific basis would have eluded them for a few hundred years. Her affliction was put down to evil humours.

At the age of eleven, she married a lesser nobleman, at least fifteen years her senior. Her husband had been a soldier and, when he wasn't on the battlefield, Bathory was a devoted wife to him. When he was at the front, though, she hopped into bed with anything and everything, including a particularly graphic scene with her own aunt.

She eventually gave birth to children - three girls and a boy - in quick succession, though there was a subplot in which the husband doubted how many of them were his own.

Mark was surprised that she had been a good mother.

The book darkened after the first twenty pages. Her husband introduced her to the art of physically abusing their servants. In his increasingly long absences, she took the ritual torture of them to new extremes. There was a double-page spread filled with graphic scenes of abuse - whipping servants with a barbed lash before dragging them into the snow to see whether they died of cold or blood loss first.

She built a coterie of accomplices - a witch who doubled as her children's wet nurse, and a crippled dwarf manservant.

Mark laughed at the book - it was getting more and more fanciful.

Her husband died, a seemingly convenient death at the hands of a prostitute infecting war wounds over an unpaid bill. Shortly afterwards, Bathory moved to the royal court in Vienna.

Mark couldn't quite recall if the Austro-Hungarian Empire would have even existed at that time, but he couldn't afford to get lost in one of his tangents.

Bathory took up with a female lover, another practicing witch. They set about maiming and killing the lowest of the people they encountered. At this time, Bathory discovered the joys of the blood bath - a bathtub filled with fresh human blood, which she believe reversed the signs of ageing.

There was another splash page of Bathory in a bath - the only colour in the entire comic, the red of blood, which had been sparing until that spread. She tastefully lay in the bath - a knee and her shoulders emerging - other comics would have shown at least one breast.

There was a scene with a cousin of Bathory's, who had learnt of her crimes, pleading with her to stop her actions. He tried to confine her to a nunnery, but she refused - the man didn't want the family name to be defiled, so eventually he backed down.

Bathory's lover died ten pages from the end. She took up with another witch, and her victims switched from common peasant girls to the daughters of nobility, who had the breeding and the blue blood but not the fortune.

The King of Hungary eventually learnt of the atrocities and ordered her arrest. This spurred the cousin into action - no longer hindered by family loyalties, he led an army to her castle.

The remaining pages showed the assault, finding bodies strewn around the corridors, the dead and the dying. Bathory was cavorting in a blood bath with her latest lover when she was captured and arrested, showing no remorse for her crimes.

There were scenes of her accomplices being convicted of the crimes, but not Bathory herself. She was never formally tried. Instead, she was bricked up inside a room, the only holes in the wall being ventilation and slots for food and drink.

She died three years into her incarceration.

Mark finished the comic. It was a strange tale, and slightly tall. It seemed to have some elements of truth to it, such as the political climate at the time, but it just felt over-the-top to him.

He flipped over to a page filled with text.

This is not fiction,
it read.

This really happened. Elizabeth Bathory - Erzsebet Bathory in her native tongue - was real. She committed these crimes and this is her story.

Frowning, Mark picked up his mobile and did a search, eventually getting enough reception to pull through a page or two about Bathory. It turned out that she was real - nothing in the book disagreed with anything he found on the internet, though the historian in him felt that there was a huge amount of artistic license.

He turned the page.

Vampires are real.

Elizabeth Bathory was not a vampire, however many of her atrocities resemble the crimes of a vampire. Her bloodlust was drawn from confusion and mental illness.

But vampires are real.

Vampirism is a rare blood disease. It is a disease which will quickly kill the host if it does not drink fresh blood. It is a disease which is similar to HIV/AIDS and Leukaemia, but which is not documented in modern medicine, except for some references in some more esoteric textbooks in certain parts of the world. It shares similar traits to Lycanthropy - the condition of becoming a werewolf - but suffers from similar ignorance.

There is a whole folklore that has built up around Vampires - the fangs, the ability to transform shape into dogs or mist, weakness to sunlight, garlic, and holy water, inability to cross water, and living in coffins. Some are true, some are fanciful.

First, most vampires in western Europe do not have fangs. Generally, the blood disease affects the fingertips, resulting in a hardening of the bone which gives the appearance of talons. This is the primary method for bloodletting, and the blood is usually drunk.

Ability to change shape has scant evidence at best, but has not been disproven.

Weaknesses to sunlight and garlic are false and true, respectively. Vampires are human beings and, while their skin is paler than average, they require sunlight for vitamins. Garlic is harmful to the condition, in much the same way that Italian cooking might kill a cold virus - it will harm the vampire disease and consequently harm the host.

Vampires can cross water, but generally do not for fear of drownings. Their bodies are host to a disease which, while endowing them with extra strength from a much stronger skeleton, adds significant weight to their bodies and drowning is a very real threat - it is very difficult for a sufferer to escape to the surface.

Arithromania is a common affliction of sufferers - an obsession with counting, no matter how trivial the task or dangerous the surroundings. Studies reveal that similar patterns to forms of autism are switched on in sufferers, regardless of where they were on the spectrum before contracting the disease.
 

Judeo-Christian beliefs - toxicity of holy water, aversion to crosses and sleeping in coffins - are a mixed bag. Holy water and crosses have no affect on the disease - there is no physical property change in holy water and crosses are merely a superstitious symbol.

Coffins, however, are preferred accommodation for a vampire. They are made from wood, and wood is good at keeping the symptoms at bay - blood decay is halted by sleeping in a wooden casket. This gives rise to the theory that the disease is caused by natural fungus - transmission is usually from ingesting poisoned vampire blood and not by bite or other means.

If vampires are real, how do you rid the sufferer of the disease?

There is no known cure for the disease, even in traditional Chinese medicine. The only alternatives are the victim regaining control over the infection or death by execution.

The primary method for execution is by a bolt through the heart - longer established vampires have a thickening of the arteries and there is extra protection around the heart. In such cases, the only method would be decapitation - the victim will die and will not come back to haunt the living world. Care must be taken when trying to execute a vampire - they have superhuman recuperation abilities, widely believed to be the inspiration for the superhero Wolverine. The most rare of cases will require entrapment - in Scottish folklore, a cairn is usually piled on top of the coffin.