Damnation Memoriae – A Hall Of Mirrors Story

Damp cruelly colonised the adamantine walls of my dank cell, leeching away vitality and self-preserving hope one shallow breath at a time. Cloaking me in its fetid embrace, the musty air, cold and oppressive, hung formless and foul around my frail body. This hellish ghoul preyed upon my pallid flesh like an unseen torturer patiently seeking the gelid bones beneath my scabrous skin. Mildew and the foul stench of my own excretions were my only companions, both relentless emissaries of that which awaited me…death.

“Lasciate ogni speranza” had been the last words spoken to me as the trembling priest scuttled out of the tower’s smallest chamber, and the mason set the final stone. Light extinguished, only darkness remained, drowning my cursed spirit in abject desolation. I had screamed until no longer able to force sound from my lips, save for sobs and grunts which grew less human with each futile utterance. Yanking wildly at the heavy iron manacles chaining me to the floor, my noble blood wetly oiled their inescapable bondage.

In the year of our lord 1614, the soul inhabiting my corporeal self departed, its nexus with my persecuted flesh severed for eternity. Entombed in our family mausoleum in Ecséd, what remained of my body had been interred as though faecal waste to be forgotten, fit for nothing but savoury victuals for the worms squirming within their dark palace.

In your year 1938, archaeologists had opened my unvisited tomb, seeking the bones that had once scaffolded my comely figure. As they forced the rotten coffin’s lid open, their eyes met with nought but the decayed remnants of my burial sash, now as black as the damp earth sullying their once luxuriant, multihued splendour. Had they fathomed the import of that which their startled eyes had witnessed, their souls would have deliquesced as surely had my own despised flesh.

Though burdened by what you might take to be schizophrenia brought on by what your practitioners have named epilepsy, my deranged mind had found immortality through metempsychosis! That which had animated my litany of licentious brutality, had broken free of its mortal constraints and lived on undiminished in both voracious force and pitiless ferocity.

When alive my temperament had been a febrile amalgam of savage rage and supercilious contempt for those who served me. Imagine a simmering cauldron of boiling water, ever ready to scald those whose hands were charged with stoking the fire enraging the venomous waters within it. My fury knew no bounds, my cruelty nursed by insatiable lust for the suffering of others. Cold-hearted contempt for my victims licenced both gruesome depravities, and the facinorous delights bled from barbarity. Torture had fed the demon within me until the cholera of 1602 no longer served to mitigate the death toll. A pontificating priest had become my unrelenting Nemesis.

György had skilfully convinced them as they listened within the Grand Hall of my infernally benighted nest, Cachtice Castle. As a noblewoman, I had every right to treat the peasants compelled to serve me as I saw fit. My only error had been to exceed such divine privilege by taking the lives of those entrusted to my vampiric care by others of my standing. Afflicted by migraines and times winged chariot, I had bathed in the freshly slaked blood of those maidens who had innocently excited my fancy and lived only to become the means to my salvation. Their blood was a small sacrifice for my eudaimonia, my knife their glistening homage to my supreme virtue.

As for torture, had not Aristotle and Sir Francis Bacon justified its joys ! Medieval Europe had unambiguously venerated the practice by manifesting justice as “the ordeal” during many a sanctimonious trial, anointing confessions derived from its merciless caresses as, “the Queen of Proofs”. Cesare Beccaria had wilted under the pressure of enlightenment, deeming violence toward a criminal a criminal act itself ! Laughably, in your year 1985, the UN Commission On Human Rights appointed a Special Rapporteur on the question of torture, and frail human sensibilities began to reconsider torture in ways that made a mockery of my foul quintessence.

Consolation lay in transference. Though my persecutors indignantly cast me into the bowels of Hell, they failed to quell Lucifer’s outraged cries. Morality may have inconveniently misguided judgement, yet immorality is unconquerable when malversation can be garbed in the apparel of authority. Fools, they preach and yet suckle me to their deluded bosom. I have risen by stealth, sanctified by popular approval if not for me, then for him I serve! Buffoonery is the disguise of preference when malfeasance seeks to be condoned rather than condemned. My master serves my needs as I facilitate his venal vices.

March 2022. The original miniature portrait had long since vanished, disappearing from the public domain in 1990. She stood before the purloined portrait anonymously painted in 1585, thin arachnid legs lifting the corners of her pursed, gelidly arrogant lips. Her rapacious, unmoored soul communed with that of the image before her. Countess Elizabeth Báthory, wife of Ferenc Nádasdy and now infamously known as the “Blood Countess”.

The immigration crisis, rank racism within the Met and the irritating burden of public duty threatened to etiolate the joys of unchallenged abuse. The Home Secretary closed the departmental report demanding justice, yet licencing its antithesis and tossed it nonchalantly into the “pending “ tray. She really did need to leave her office, its walls were beginning to seem a little familiar, stirring the sediment of past sins. She allowed her serpentine eyes to rest upon her previous form and thanked popularism for its insane legitimisation of her actions. Centuries had passed, yet the peasants still remained ignorant fodder for her demonic appetites.