The Nosferatu Scroll

17

Without a watch, Marietta had no idea of the time, or even if it was day or night. She’d been given another tray of food about three or four hours ago, just bread, ham and cheese and a cup of coffee, which she presumed was her lunch. Since then she’d neither heard nor seen anyone or anything. Despite being terrified about her predicament, she was also thoroughly bored.

Her other problem was the cold. The cellar was obviously damp, the walls moist to the touch, and the very air chilled her bones. The only way she could keep warm was by sitting on the bed and wrapping the blanket around her.

Hours later, she heard the rumble of the cellar door opening again, and the guard reappeared with another tray, which he placed on the floor near her bed. A waft of even colder air seemed to swoop down the staircase, reducing the temperature in the cellar still further. Marietta guessed that it was already late afternoon, and the temperature was dropping.

She didn’t move, didn’t speak, just watched as he swapped the trays round and turned to leave. Then, as he started walking away towards the spiral staircase, Marietta heard a sound that chilled her even more than the cold of her surroundings. Through the open door to the ruined church above the cellar, she suddenly heard a loud and mournful howl.

Somehow she knew it wasn’t a dog, an Alsatian or anything like that. There was something different about that noise, something that caused the hairs on the back of her neck to rise. It sounded almost primeval, an ancient human nightmare come terrifyingly to life.

And it was close – really close. Definitely somewhere on the island.

‘What’s that?’ she demanded, as the guard continued to walk away from her.

He stopped, turned round and looked back at her, a malicious grin working its way across his face. ‘Just one of our little pets,’ he said. ‘A playmate for you, perhaps, a bit later on.’

‘But what is it?’ she asked again. ‘A wolf?’

‘You’ll find out,’ the guard said. ‘But if I were you, I wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to meet it.’

A few seconds later, the cellar door rumbled closed and Marietta was alone once more with her thoughts and fears.

At first, she ignored her meal and just sat on the bed, looking across the cellar to the base of the spiral staircase. Over and over again, in her mind, she replayed the sound she’d heard, and the guard’s thinly veiled threat.

She was never going to escape from this island. She knew that with a kind of dull certainty that settled in her mind like a cold and heavy weight. There was no hope for her.

Marietta toppled onto her side, pulled the filthy blanket over her head, and let the tears flow.