Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [76]
Arrested on December 30, 1610, the fifty-year-old countess was charged with committing what a panel of judges called “an almost unbelievable number of murders.” Through surviving court documents from her two trials, it’s possible to sift a handful of facts from the voluminous legend that has since engulfed Elizabeth Bathory. The countess was not present at either trial (she’d been placed under house arrest in her castle), but her four closest servants, charged as accomplices, were brought before the judges. Previously tortured, the servants, one by one, ratted out their boss. The body count was thirty-six, thirty-seven, or fifty-one girls, depending on whom you believed. Another witness, not charged, claimed the number was much higher. She testified to what she’d heard secondhand: A castle servant had found among Bathory’s possessions a handwritten list of victims, 650 in all. This smoking gun, however, was never introduced into evidence. Neither was a word said regarding Bathory’s bloodbathing. Nonetheless, snippets of the transcript remain chilling: “The countess stuck needles into the girls.” “She bit out individual pieces of flesh . . . with her teeth.” She “attacked the girls with knives” and “beat them so hard that one could scoop up the blood from their beds by the handfuls.” If the servants had been hoping for leniency, they were sorely disappointed. Three were sentenced to execution—one was beheaded; two were burned alive after being de-fingered—and the fourth to life in prison. Bathory, too, was given a life sentence, though, as a concession to her noble lineage, this meant confinement to a small room in her castle, the windows and doors of which were bricked in, save for a slot for food. Till her death three years later, she maintained her innocence.
In terms of sheer villainy, one can easily imagine how the stories of Vlad and Elizabeth may’ve inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But to tap into that essential cringe factor, the novelist turned to the animal kingdom. To the Desmodus rotundus in particular—the vampire bat. That Stoker pored over a description in the 1823 edition of Anecdotes of the Habits and Instincts of Animals prompted my own poking into present-day sources. Apart from its repellent appearance—the beady eyes, horsey ears, and piggish snout—what makes the vampire such a nauseating bat is its signature mode of feeding: A nighttime hunter, it lands on the ground a few feet from its victim, usually a sleeping cow or horse, and skitters forward on all fours. It’s said that sleeping human beings are sometimes its prey, so you may want to splurge on the extra-strength mosquito netting next time you’re in Central or South America, the species’ native habitat. Powerful hind legs aid the sparrow-sized mammal in scaling a dangled arm, leg, or tail. The bat then sinks its razor-sharp canine teeth into a fleshy area such as the neck, having first licked soft the spot. Its saliva, which contains an anti-clotting enzyme, keeps the blood flowing while the vampire sucks. (So potent is this superdrool that scientists have synthesized the anticoagulant into a powerful blood-thinning medication called Draculin, appropriately enough.) A good thirty minutes of nightly feeding meets a bat’s necessary daily intake; the vampire survives wholly on blood. The bat’s bite can also spread disease (rabies, for instance), and although Stoker doesn’t expressly say so, this is also how Dracula transmitted his contagion. Vampirism is an infectious disease in which evil is the pathogen. With each new bite, one’s essence is overwhelmed, one’s blood overpowered.
BRAM STOKER TOOK GREAT CARE TO CLOAK HIS VAMPIRE TALE IN THE guise of realism. The more authentic and contemporary