The story behind Blood Ritual.
History is sprinkled with people from wild and lawless lineages, many of whom can be eagerly pounced on by an author trawling the centuries for characters on which to hang plots.
But what seldom happens, is that a ready-made vampire legend presents itself as the basis for a book.
I hadn’t been especially looking for vampires, and it was almost by accident that I came across the seventeenth-century Hungarian countess, Elizabeth Bathory. But once I had discovered her, dark and evil as she undoubtedly was, I could not banish the compulsion to make use of her.
Elizabeth’s legacy is as blood-drenched as that of Bram Stoker’s Dracula – and in fact, she’s been a bit overshadowed by him. But although various theories exist as to the inspiration for Dracula and whether he might have been based on an actual person, Elizabeth was certainly real. She lived in the territories bordering Transylvania, and during her life she terrorised the countryside surrounding her bleak and remote castles. A portrait, believed to be of her, exists, and if it can be trusted she was a striking-looking lady. However, her looks belied her nature. She was prodigiously cruel and sadistic, and possessed of a consuming vanity which drove her to slaughter more than 300 young girls, in the belief that to bathe in their blood would preserve her beauty and her youth.
When I wrote Blood Ritual I wasn’t able to travel to any of Elizabeth’s haunts, but some years later I went to Vienna, where she had had a town house. I hoped to find it, and incredibly I did – it’s situated in one of the really eerie pockets of Old Vienna: a place called the Blutgasse – Blood Alley. It was as creepy and ancient as I had imagined, apparently owing its name to the mass slaughter of the Knights Templar in the 12th century when the cobblestones ran with their blood. But what I hadn’t expected was that at one end of the Blutgasse would be a dwelling in which no less a person than Mozart once lived – from a window it was possible to look onto Elizabeth’s house. Impossible to resist the thought that if a century and a half hadn’t separated those two they would have been neighbours; they could have waved to one another, or discussed the weather when putting out the milk bottles.
Elizabeth’s story has come down to the present in fragments: mostly from the archives of the Court of Vienna where, because of their horrific content, the documents relating to her life and death were kept under lock and key for more than a century. It wasn’t until the early part of the eighteenth century that the documents were discovered by a Jesuit Father, who pieced together much of her story.
At this distance, it’s impossible to know whether Elizabeth was mad – a psychopath or sexual sadist in today’s terms – or whether she was one of the genuinely evil people who litter the pages of history. Her acts of barbarism and the accounts of the torture chambers she set up to commit her butchery read like the most extreme kind of horror fiction. But in the writing of Blood Ritual I did not exaggerate any one of them.