Part 17 (1/2)

”The pages. Read them aloud,” Winnie suggested. ”We'll share them together.”

Mina nodded and began to read.

I have been in this place of horror for nearly a century. I long ago stopped wondering if I am a captive, as I know I have become a willing accomplice to the deeds that go on here. Even so, I write this account in the hope that someone may find it and know my fate, and as a warning to those who may come here. Leave this place, if you can. Leave before nightfall.

Even I, who do not wish to kill, have so little control.

The others laugh at me for wanting to write this. He, in particular, reminds me that no one ever leaves this place alive.

Yet I have hope. The world around us is more crowded than ever before. Someday, someone may come by day and leave by day. If they do and they are from this region, they may leave me with the true death I long for.

”True death?” Winnie asked.

”It was a term Van Helsing also used. It means that her body will be destroyed and her soul will pa.s.s on.”

”What a sad thing to wish for oneself.”

”Not so sad when you consider how they must live,” Mina reminded her and continued.

My name is Karina Aliczni. I was born in the year 1753 in Bratislava, though my family home was in Targoviste. My t.i.tle then was countess. The t.i.tle seems so unimportant now that I live with a prince, a princess and a creature who had no t.i.tle when she was a alive though, had she ambition equal to her power, she could rule the world.

When I think back through all the years to my mortal childhood, it seems that I was prepared for only one station in life- to marry and become a wife and mother. My training then was in how to wear clothes properly, how to apply rouge and powder, how to curtsy, how to dance, how to play the spinet and sing.

I was also well educated. I had read of foreign places. My father visited some of them, bringing me hack porcelain music boxes from France, gold earrings with tiny opaque gems in star-shaped mountings from the Pyrenees, a map of the world from Italy. The last only made my longing worse. I would not marry some foolish n.o.ble tied to his lands and his traditions.

I wanted to travel, to see everything I could of the world. I vowed to find someone who felt as I did, even if it meant joining the gypsies to do it.

My father, of course, had other ideas, and one of them was to expand the family holdings through the proper alliances.

My brother wed without any protest a well-dowered girl. Though he swore to me that she was too ugly to bed and that there would never be children from the marriage, she gave birth only ten months later. To my dismay and my father's great satisfaction, they seemed happy. My sister married a year later in a similar arrangement, and / knew I would be next.

I begged my mother for time, pleading that I was too young to be a wife, too frail to be a mother. I was the youngest.

She had always sheltered me. She did so now.

Something in the way she saw through my lies but responded to my needs made me more comfortable around her than I had been since I was old enough to realize that parents are not infallible. I spoke to her from my heart, telling her of the need I had to live somewhere as far from our little plot of land and our comfortable home as I could. I hastened to explain that this was not because I disliked our life but because I wanted, with a pa.s.sion I could not understand, to experience something different.

I do not know if she spoke to my father, but in the days that followed he observed me in a way he had never done before.

He would ask me to read to him, to sing. He would order my daily wardrobe and would walk with me in the garden behind,

our home.

What my mother must have suggested to him seems so obvious now. I was beautiful, t.i.tled. I should not be wasted on a local marriage to expand our holdings but sent to the capital to attract a better suitor, and hopefully forge an alliance with a family of great wealth and greater power.

The dressmakers came with their satins and velvets and bolts of delicate lace. At night, my father would teach me the newest dance steps. In the absence of any music, he would count the rhythm as we moved through the steps. When he could teach me no more, he sent my mother and me to Bratislava. !n the capital, I was given my final lessons by dance instructors and tutors and the well-paid lady's maid my father hired to educate me in deportment.

I was such an eager pupil and such a quick one. Everyone said so, and yet all his plans, all my work came to nothing. My mother took me to court. I danced. I charmed those around me. I even fell in love, in that innocent way of innocent girls, far more than once on the months we spent there, but no one was serious about a match.

”It's your beauty,” one of my servants whispered to me on a night when I seemed particularly despondent. ”It puts men off.”

I looked in the mirror. I had never thought of myself as beautiful. Instead, I had believed that women smiled at me and men gave me longer, more admiring looks because of the ribbons in my hair, the way my servants had dressed me or painted my nails. Such innocence, such perfect innocence.

While I hid my misery as best I could and hoped for someone to save me, my mother was renewing old friends.h.i.+ps, among them one with a woman who had an estate in the mountains near Sibiu. My mother suggested that we visit there. I agreed happily for I needed relief from the constant disappointment.

The estate was huge, with a great stone wall running all around it, and outside its fields and gardens was beautiful country, wild and empty. The lower hills were colored dark green by the dense pine forests, with sharp black peaks rising above them. I loved the land, but the people were a different story. They seemed isolated, suspicious of strangers, even those coming to the land in the company of its ruling family. My mother did not seem to notice, but then all her attention was concentrated on her friend. She had little desire to see the countryside around the estate.

Meanwhile, I had little desire to see another set of tapestry-hung walls, particularly when my entire life would likely be filled with such walls. I cultivated the friends.h.i.+p of the woman's son, Janos, a stupid and rather ugly boy a year younger than I. My charm, which had so little effect on the worldly men at court, was more than enough for this conquest. Within days, he was helping me slip out of the estate so he could escort me for rides through the wild countryside or into the town.

I sensed the vampire's presence the afternoon of our visit to Sibiu. The day had been thick with clouds, so that noon resembled twilight. I had been fearful of a storm, but my companion a.s.sured me that such clouds meant nothing in these damp mountains.

How could Janos have known the truth? He was wealthy, as isolated from the superst.i.tions of the peasants as I. With only a knowledge of German and Hungarian, he did not even speak their language. If he had, he might have known that dense clouds did mean something in this or any land. Clouds meant that the dead could walk.

I think it was a little after noon when we reached Sibiu, though it would have been impossible to know this by looking at the sky. We had stopped to visit the priest who lived on the edge of town. I was dismounting when, outside the stone wall surrounding the churchyard, I saw a man watching me. Though his back was straight, his face was deeply lined, and what hair I could see under the black hood of his cloak was thin and gray. Yet his face interested me. His eyes in particular seemed to catch the light of the sky and glow as they watched me intently.What harm could an old man do me? I had walked toward him, intending to speak a few words to him, when the priest came outside.

”Come away!” he called to me. ”Come inside.”

My hand was extended toward the man. He had just raised his own to touch me when I pulled back, turned and joined my companions. ”Was that someone you know?” I asked the priest.

He nodded and said nothing. Janos, who had been seeing to the horses, turned and looked toward the road. ”Who?” he asked.

I looked back and the man was gone. We did not speak of him again, but when we left for the ride back to the estate an hour later, the priest blessed us very solomnly before letting us go. He used a language I had never heard before. When I inquired about it, he told me it was the old tongue, rarely used in our time. As we left, I thought I saw the old man standing in the forest close to the road, watching silently as we pa.s.sed.

I heard later what happened that night. The priest had said the evening service and left to walk through the churchyard to his little house. He never reached it. Like so many others, his body was never found. I know his resting place well now, the deep chasm where his bones and the bones of a thousand others lie crumbling beneath the weight of the new kills falling above them.

Yes, I am not so innocent now.

The next time I saw the man from the churchyard was while walking in the garden of the estate the following evening.

He was sitting on a bench close to the heavily scented wisteria blooms. His body had been restored by the life it had consumed. His hair was black, his face unlined, his hands powerful and young. Only the eyes were the same-dark and intent.

A relation to the old man, I thought, yet the similarity was so strong. And, of course, he knew me enough to call me by name.

Was I troubled by this? Not at all. I was in hailing distance of the house, in the gardens of a powerful family. Their guards patrolled the borders of the property. It seemed that the man must have been trusted with admission. Besides, what possible reason would a thief or murderer have for sitting so openly on the grounds?

Had I known what danger I was attracting, would I have gone to him and sat with him and held his cold, pale hands? I doubt an army could have altered my future once he saw me, and now that my future has been set like a pattern in marble, there is no other known to me, no way to find regret.

He spoke of the land, its history and its customs. I spoke of court at Bratislava, of the clothes the women wore, the wealth of the prince. Then, suddenly, with no real warning, I was speaking not of others but of myself and the walls I would face throughout my life.

Suddenly he was kissing me, his mouth hard against mine, his teeth so sharp that my lips bled. I pushed him away, turned and ran toward the house. When I looked back to see if he would follow, he had vanished as if the deepening night shadows had swallowed him whole.

He had given me no name to call him by, no way to find him again. If I had not thought that I would be punished for approaching a stranger, I might have asked my mother about him. Janos, whom I trusted more, knew nothing about the stranger. The mystery of him only added to my pa.s.sion, and the following evening, I walked in the garden again. But though I stayed among the rhododendrons, the lilies and the blooming vines for hours, he did not come.

The next night, I woke late and looked outside on the moon-drenched lawn. He stood among the flowers, looking up at my window. Child that I was, I had become infatuated with the strangeness of him. I put on a cloak and stole outside, the dew coal on my feet as I ran to him.

I recalled the night perfectly, the s.h.i.+ver I felt as he brushed his lips against my bare shoulder, the side of my neck. He unlaced my nights.h.i.+rt. I felt his lips on my breast, a pressure there, and an instant later, whatever innocence I possessed died.

On the last few words, Mina's voice had grown soft. Now she stopped reading altogether, looking from the pages to the flames in the parlour stove. Winnie rested a hand over hers. ”You wanted to learn from this account,” she said as if expecting Mina to destroy the pages.