"Aaaaaeeeeeeee!!!!! You stupid bitch!" She thundered at the frail, trembling figure beside her. "You've ripped open my entire scalp!"

She roared grabbing the metallic hairbrush from the girls quaking hands in a swooping hawk-like motion. "I'll teach you to pull at my hair, come here" she bellowed clasping the terrified child's hair in her sinewy fingers. With the other hand she slashed the hairbrush at the girls face causing an instant ugly gash across her mouth. Blood splattered on the polished marble floor and onto the hands of the raging Countess. She roared an obscene, demented cackle going into spasms of delight over the suffering she had just inflicted, clapping her hands and watching the blood flick around in all directions.

Then she held her hands up so that the girl’s blood trickled up her pale, veined arms. She watched the tiny rivulets etch their way with a crazed, childlike fascination, savouring every moment and suddendly she spun around to face her companion, wild eyed and mad with excitement. "Look what happened" she screamed rushing forward holding out her blood soaked hands "the wrinkles have gone, look! Look!"

She smeared some of the blood on her cheeks and waited breathlessly by the mirror. "It's a miracle" she croaked. " Dorka, it's a mirr-icc-call!" Dorka, the Countess Elisabeth’s accomplice in torture and sadism and perhaps only friend, peered squint eyed at Elisabeth’s blood reddened cheeks. "You look 'healthier, younger, its interesting"

"I've done it, don't you see, I've done it, this is it! This the secret! Bring me the girl." What followed was a grisly act of butchery, with the blood being drained from the corpse meticulously in order for the Countess to indulge in her latest and most horrific fantasy. She bathed in the sickly sweet, putrid smelling stuff, sponging herself down lovingly, allowing every pore of her body to soak up the "rejuvenating" liquid.

Countess Elisabeth Bathory had always been a strange and profoundly nasty person, but now she had graduated to the depths of murder with the newly aroused bloodlust. Six years later when rumours of her tortures and bloodbaths reached the Hungarian Emperor Matthias II, a committee was sent to investigate the Bathory Estate. Eventually a mass grave of over 650 bodies were discovered - all victims of the demented Countess.

Born around 1560 into a noble family in what was then the Hungarian Empire, Elisabeth was a difficult child, prone to fits of rage and a vicious temper. She would amuse herself as a child by torturing and killing insects and then progressed to small birds, frogs and squirrels and other small creatures. She married at the age of just 15 to Count Ferenc Nadasdy who would often be away on duty for long stretches of time. The Countess and her one friend Dorka, would while away they're hours torturing and abusing the array of peasants available to them.

The Countess was despised by her folk yet they had little option as the Count's personal guard ruled with a brut iron fist. Yet as months of murder passed into years, news of the atrocities began to spread until the Countess’ reputation for evil matched that of her distant cousin Vlad the infamous Impaler of Transylvania.

Eventually after a murderous spree spanning half a dozen years, Elisabeth’s bloodbaths finally came to an end upon discovery of the mass grave. The Countess had run out of space within her castle for the drained cadavers and rather nonchalantly took to chucking then, over the castle walls just like the rest of the waste material. Villagers and passers by would discover their loved ones, festering and rotting away in heaps outside the castle walls.

Continued: Countess Dracula, Page 2 >>>