The Seducer: A Gone From Daylight Inspired Story - 15. William Harker’s Journal: Entry 15

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Sunday, September 23, 1989

I spent most of the day by myself in this big old place.

All day, I spent hiking around the estate, swimming in the swimming pool, catching up on my reading, studying my Romanian, etc. I only got to see Dr. V briefly just before dinner just after sundown. He seemed in a rush and was rather short with me as he greeted me and almost flew out the door! Whoever he had an appointment with tonight, he seemed super eager to meet them. Perhaps, he’s teaching a class on Sundays that he hasn’t yet told me about. Perhaps, he has a date and was interested in not being late for her. Somehow, that seemed weird to me, Dr. V actually having a romantic life outside of his academic one. Why that should confuse me is beyond me. He’s a regular man, after all, and I’m certainly not ‘date’ material for a male professor…I guess.

I don’t know why, then, the thought of Dr. V being with someone romantically makes me slightly jealous! He’s been so attentive to my needs here in all way save that one way. He’s a decent sort so I don’t know why I should think he’d want to go for me in that way. Why would I want him to?

Why indeed?

In other news, this big beautiful house at night is a bit…creepy. The parts I’m in are lit very well, almost too well, but I can look down the many halls and passages and see where the light fades into the shadowy darkness. It gives the impression that most of the house lies in darkness, unused and untended. The place is very quiet too. Sometimes, I swear I can hear a door close somewhere in the house deep in the part where there shouldn’t be anyone.

Then, there’s the situation with the wolves!

Never in all my days did I think California could play host to packs of WOLVES running around the hills of San Mateo county! But, I have been hearing them every night since coming here. I don’t dare go outside with that running around loose!

I want to convince myself its just dogs, but no…those are no dogs. They aren’t even coyotes. Those are wolves out there! I wonder if the County Sheriff, Animal Control, and PETA know that a full on pack of timber wolves are prowling around populated areas?

I’d watch TV, but apparently, Dr. V doesn’t own one! Being an academic, I suppose he has no use for such a thing. Fortunately, his library is vast and with some very intriguing volumes of things I’d never seen before.

I found this one book that was ornately bound. It was obviously an old volume and one done with leather covers and bindings. In all my life, never have I seen a book so beautifully bound! Its title is “Scholomance’. I looked inside and the pages are velum, basically sheep-skin pages. The text is hand written, but in a language I can’t read. Through the stylized writing all I can make out are a lot of words that have a lot of ‘Zs’ in them. It wasn’t Romanian, of this I was certain!

Though I couldn’t read the text, I saw some beautifully illuminated panels of fantastical creatures like dragons, giant bat-like creatures, obvious demons, and skeletal creatures. One of the few words I could make out from the text actually named the skeletal things - Lyktz. I recognized that word to mean ‘Lych’ - a creature of black magic that was an animated skeleton or corpse. It walked the world still because its soul was kept somewhere apart from the body and yet it lent ‘life’ to the dead creature. I knew of this kind of thing from the Dungeons and Dragons Role-Playing game I played a lot in Jr. High and High School.

I realized, then, that the book ‘Scholomance’ was a tome about black magic! Naturally, I put that thing away as soon as I got what it was about.

I found it odd that such a thing should be in a serious historian’s library since it had to be a work of complete fantasy! Perhaps Dr. V kept such books as representations of myths and legends of historical peoples.

After finding a complete set of the latest Encyclopedia Britannica, I looked up the word Scholomance and found that it referred to an actual school of black magic! A school that, legend says, existed in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania!

That was the connection, then. Certainly, Dr. V’s knowledge of his homeland’s history must be the most complete of any academic! His knowledge went so deep as to find an actual ancient book regarding a mythical school of magic believed to exist right on the back doorstep of his home country.

While I was thinking about this, something pretty creepy happened!

First, I felt a chill and a slight breeze as if someone had opened a window during a snow storm! Then the chandeliers flickered a bit and began to sway. I accounted that to the unexpected cold wind in the room. Then, something started rattling in one of the bookshelves off to the left of me. Just as I turned, a book slid out and dropped to the floor!

Naturally, after getting my wits back that I’d been scared out of, I walked over and picked up the book from the floor. It was titled The Lady Of Čachtický Hrad - English Translation. The author of the book? Sir Vlad Țepeș Valahi, Professor Emeritus of History, Stanford!

I did what I sometimes do with new books to see if they are interesting or not, I flipped the book open to a random page and read what I found there. What I read…made my skin crawl!

“When the prepared Holy Blood was thus introduced to the deceased creature, it arose as if alive! The wound at its neck healed over, but the body remained headless. The feathers that had been ruffled by the trauma of death smoothed with their iridescence returned to them. The pigeon strutted about the table blindly, its stump of a neck undulating as if it still carried a head! The effect upon my person was to be aghast as my stomach turned nauseated.”

I blinked a couple of times trying to figure out what I’d just read!

After that, I sat there and began reading the whole book from its beginning! Never had I read a book like this! Just sitting there for half the night pouring over its pages! Dr. V writes as good as he speaks, better even! The story he tells of this ‘Blood Countess’ is the most riveting horror story I’d ever read, only…Dr. V claims it to be true!

Truly, this woman had been a monster!

She was Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed, also known as the Blood Countess and, per Dr. V’s narrative, she was a suspected vampire and sorceress/scientist. She killed young girls for their blood and then made use of their blood to preserve her unnatural youth.

To make their blood ‘Holy’ she would regularly torture the girls to the brink of death while collecting their blood. The theory of this mad woman was that the pain and fear made the blood ‘richer with the Life Force’ thus giving it holy powers to revive and sustain life in that which should be dead or to that which is dying.

Dr. V conjectured that she must have thought of herself as a vampire of legend since that is what the Vampyre do, drink the blood of the living to steal away their life force and keep it for their undead selves. Báthory, apparently, took this one step further and made the blood ‘super charged,’ somehow, so that one drop of blood could do the work of pints and pints!

She was distilling life for the Undead! Or, at least, that is what her insanity believed.

As I read on, the room seemed to get darker and darker, as if the lights had lost their glow. The room became chill and I swore I could here the bubbling laughter of a lady somewhere far away, but strangely close too! I chocked it up to my imagination and continued reading.

The authorities tried investigating the Countess since claims of missing children were starting to cause uprisings in the villages and townships all around her castle. But, being a part of the Noble Class of Hungary, she was afforded certain privileges under the law that common folks never got. That meant that the last place the authorities went looking for a culprit was to the castle and to the castle’s occupants. By the time they got around to investigating Lady Báthory, she had disappeared!

Dr. V explains that this is contrary to the typical legend of the Blood Countess which cites that the Lady was arrested, tried, and sentenced to captivity within her own castle. She lasted five years in this way and then died, presumably, of natural causes.

Dr. V, though, figured another kind of end to Báthory‘s reign of terror - she’d been captured by members of an elite society she’d been working for and had been dealt with by them. Dr. V explained that this society actually hired Báthory to conduct experiments on human children to see if a blood product could be made that would spare their members from having to hunt! Apparently, she’d been successful, but had gotten too greedy with these ‘blood sacrifices’ of hers and had started to make trouble for this elite club of Elders. She had become too high profile in her killing. Hence, she had started to attract the wrong kind of attention to herself and thus her employers.

She was dealt with permanently by the leader of this group of so-called Elders, Dr. V cites.

Finishing up the book, I couldn’t help but be stuck on the need to call out these murdered children as human. Were there other children they were after that weren’t human or, more disturbingly, were these Elders something other than human themselves? Also…why did these horrible Elders want to hunt children for their blood in the first place? Why did they want a distilled form of this blood that had better life giving capabilities?

What was Dr. V trying to say here? Had Lady Báthory been right about herself?

Are these Vampires real and do they hunt humans for their blood?

I wouldn’t even question the book if I knew it was just a novel Dr. V had written for entertainment value, but his citations all throughout the book, his research credits, all his details and subnotes are things that a true academic journal does to claim itself to be true! This book is a document, not a novel!

Lady Báthory had been real and Dr. V was clearly implying she was a living and real vampire working for an elite society of other vampires!

I feel very weird now…like I should get out of here!

Dr. V is clearly a madman - and something or someone in this house just warned me of this fact!