The Nosferatu Scroll

21

Marietta Perini stared in horror at the cockroach climbing up the wooden leg of her bed. It was almost the size of a rat, easily the biggest insect she had ever seen. She lay still, clutching the filthy blanket in both hands, paralysed with terror, because that was just the vanguard of the attack. From the other side of the bed, by the stained concrete wall, dozens of enormous insects were climbing up towards her. She could see their probing antennae above the edge of the mattress, could hear their feet scratching as they drew closer to her.

Then the first cockroach reached her feet and, with a sudden spurt, ran straight under the blanket, heading for her bare legs. She felt the insect’s horny carapace rubbing along the side of her calf, felt the movements of its legs as it moved up her body, but she simply couldn’t move an inch. Then a tidal wave of cockroaches swept across the edge of the mattress, heading straight towards her, and finally she found her voice.

She screamed, the noise echoing off the walls of the cellar, and suddenly found she could move. She threw the blanket from her body and jumped off the mattress on to the floor, the chain attached to her left wrist wrenching her arm back as she did so.

And then she woke up. For a few seconds she stood stock still, panting with terror, eyes wide as she stared around her, looking at the nightmare that had become her reality. There were no giant cockroaches, of course, but there were three or four of the insects scuttling about on her bed.

With an expression of disgust, Marietta flicked them off with the blanket, and checked the mattress and her clothing carefully before she got back on to the bed. She hadn’t expected to sleep at all, her mind whirling with images of insects and rats, and whatever that nameless creature was that she’d heard howling the previous night, and what sleep she’d got had been restless and disturbed, punctuated by vivid and disturbing images.

Then her thoughts shifted, changing direction, and an image of her boyfriend’s face swam into her mind. He would be worried sick about her. He had always been possessive, perhaps too possessive, forever wanting to know where she was, where she was going and who she was with. In the past she’d found it slightly irksome – she was, after all, a liberated Venetian woman – but right then she thanked her stars for Augusto’s personality. He would, she knew, have tried to contact her, to call her mobile, when she hadn’t arrived at his apartment that evening as they’d arranged. Then he would have called her parents, and after that he would have raised the alarm.

Somewhere out there, beyond the island, the search would already have begun. People – a lot of people – would be out looking for her by now, of that she was certain.

She thought of her parents, sitting in their small apartment at the north-western end of Venice, near the railway station, worrying about her, wondering where she was and – knowing them as she did – probably fearing the worst. More than anything else, she wished she could see them again, or at least talk to her mother one last time. But that, she knew, wasn’t going to happen.

Tears sprang to her eyes, and she wiped them away angrily, because she’d just heard the cellar door rumble open. She didn’t want to show any sign of weakness, of emotion, to her captors. It wouldn’t make any difference to her fate, but keeping up her calm facade gave her something – some tiny bit of pride and strength – to hang on to.

One of the guards stepped into the cellar and walked across to her, a plastic tray in his hands.

‘Why are you keeping me here?’ Marietta asked, as the man lowered the tray to the floor and turned to walk away.

‘You’ll find out,’ the guard snapped, as he’d done on every previous occasion. But this time, as he turned to leave the cellar, he looked back towards her for the briefest of instants with something like pity in his eyes, and added a single bleak sentence that drove all other thoughts from her mind. ‘You’ll find out tonight, because we’ve just found the second one.’