1610: Countess Elizabeth Bathory is placed under house arrest for charges including the torture and murder of hundreds of peasant girls in Royal Hungary (present-day Slovakia). Witnesses at her trial testified that she would burn, mutilate, and bite the flesh off her victims, and bathe in their virginal blood to retain her youth, spawning countless legends and earning her the nickname of “The Blood Countess”…

1875: Edward Alexander Crowley (later changed to Aleister) is born at 36 Clarendon Square in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England…

1981: Peter Murphy is taking in some of the sights in Rome the day before a show when he catches a whiff of something seductive, feels it brush past him, then dissipate into thin air. He quickly rifles through his coat to make sure he hasn’t been pick-pocketed, then makes his way through the crowd of tourists when he smells it again. This time he’s quick enough to match a form with the scent, and before he knows it, he’s in hot pursuit. She’s tall and slender, fashionable—though not pretentiously so—in pea-coat, scarf, tight jeans, and knee-high boots. Her jet black hair is spiky and fluffy at the same time, with not a small amount of hairspray holding it together—but this being 1981, that could hardly be perceived as a flaw, akin to complaining that your pet goldfish needs to live in a tank of water and can’t play fetch, etc. Something about her gait strikes Peter profoundly—she is walking briskly, yet confident, relaxed—a panther utterly at home in her own skin. He has trouble keeping up with her, and almost loses her twice—first around a corner near the Spanish Steps and later in a crowd surrounding the Trevi Fountain—but Peter is determined to have his prize.

He’s almost in step with her when she ducks into a store. Peter sits back in an alley and waits for her to emerge. Recently he’s been reading Graham Greene’s Our Man In Havana, so he takes to this kind of intrigue like a duck to water. Finally, he thinks, I feel like a character in a novel—a protagonist, at that. Every second is charged with a kind of drama. Exactly what sort of bird is she, he thinks. A femme fatale? An angel with a secret to hide? His mind races at the possibilities. By the time she exits the store, Peter is convinced he is on the trail of a woman who is equal parts Joan Jett, Catherine Deneuve, and the White Goddess of pagan mythology, that tri-form entity of birth, love, and death.

On the Via Perugino he follows her not even four feet behind. He catches that scent again, that admixture of nightshade and eternity and the adult bookstore in Brighton he used to sneak into as a lad. Her scarf trails behind her, flapping in the wind, so close he can almost grab it. He’s reminded for an instant of that tragic prima ballerina, Isadora Duncan, and how she was strangled to death when her exorbitantly long scarf was caught in the wheel-well of her automobile. Peter imagines a similar fate for this ingénue. I’ll grab you by the scarf and pull you in, he thinks. He’ll hold her close and whisper some devastating aphorism of Baudelaire or the Comte de Lautreamont, and she would belong to him body and soul.

He reaches out and grabs the end of the scarf, only it doesn’t stop her in her tracks, but merely slips off her neck entirely. She continues walking another dozen steps or so before she realizes her scarf is missing, then turns around to face Peter, confidently clutching the scarf, channeling Casanova, Don Giovanni, and a little Count Dracula for good measure. When it becomes apparent that this femme fatale is indeed bandmate Daniel Ash—who was on his way to pick up a tennis racket he’d had restrung the day before—Peter’s mind scrambles for an excuse. He mumbles something about needing to clarify that night’s set list. Ash replies that he’s “kind of busy at the moment” and that he’s “sure it can wait till soundcheck”. Peter agrees, and comments on what nice weather they’d been having…