The Nosferatu Scroll

29

Angela came to slowly. Her head was throbbing, and when she tried to move her hands she couldn’t. Unaccountably, they remained by her side, as if she was held by some kind of restraint. There was something tied around her thighs as well, and she could feel a pad or bandage wrapped round her head and covering her eyes.

She could sense people around her, could hear figures moving and talking in a language she didn’t understand. For a few moments she assumed she must have had some kind of accident and was in hospital. That would explain the noises, certainly, but she had no recollection of how she’d got there.

What had happened to her? She remembered being in the hotel, remembered leaving the building and walking down the streets with Chris at her side. Then her memories became more confused. There had been a man, and a door suddenly opening right in front of them. And then something else had happened but she couldn’t clearly remember what. There had been other figures, men crowding around her, a dark room or maybe a passageway, then nothing.

Where was Chris? And where was she, come to that? Angela suddenly went cold as the realization finally dawned on her. She wasn’t in any hospital. She was somewhere far, far worse.

The murmur of voices around her ebbed and flowed. The only thing she was sure about was that they were speaking Italian. She recognized the musical cadences of the language, if nothing else.

Then she felt hands doing something to the bandage that was wrapped around her head; and moments later the pad was lifted away from her face and she opened her eyes.

High above her was a white ceiling, decorated with elaborate cornices and mouldings, and with a large electric chandelier providing brilliant illumination. It was the kind of ceiling you might expect to find in the drawing-room of an English country house. But the one thing she was certain of was that she was a long way from England.

She seemed to be lying flat on her back on a wide sofa, her wrists tied with lengths of cord; and cord was wrapped around her upper thighs, too: a simple and effective way of immobilizing her. Standing in a rough circle around the sofa were about half a dozen well-dressed men, all looking at her and talking quietly together. Their expressions were neither hostile nor threatening: they simply looked down, regarding her as though she was a strange life-form they’d not previously encountered, which Angela found far more disturbing than blatant aggression would have been.

‘Who are you?’ Angela asked, her voice cracking with tension.

But the men just continued to look at her, with no hint of understanding in their faces.

Angela tried again. ‘Where am I?’

‘You’re on an island in the Venetian lagoon,’ a new voice replied in accented English, and the circle of men parted to admit another figure.

He was, like the other men in the room, smartly dressed in a dark suit. He looked as if he was about forty years old, with the dark hair and complexion that characterized many Italians. His features were regular, unmemorable, almost pleasant, but his eyes were cold and dispassionate as he approached her.

She looked up at him, fixing her attention on the man simply because he appeared to be the only one in the room who understood – or at least the only one who spoke – English.

‘What island?’ she asked.

‘Its name isn’t important. It’s a private island in a secluded part – a very secluded part – of the Laguna Veneta.’

‘What do you want with me?’

‘Your help, at least to begin with.’

‘What kind of help?’ she asked.

‘Professional, of course. You and your husband removed a book that was not your property.’ He held up the fragile leather-bound diary Angela had taken from the old tomb on the Isola di San Marco.

‘I’m not sure it’s anybody’s property,’ Angela said, more annoyed now than scared. ‘The grave we found it in was about two hundred years old, which means anything in it cannot possibly belong to anyone living today.’

‘I’m not going to discuss the legal status of the possessions of a corpse with you,’ the man snapped. ‘We have spent a considerable amount of time and money trying to find this book, only to have you walk off with it.’

Angela struggled to sit up, then realized it was impossible. The man issued a brief instruction, and two of his companions removed her bonds and helped her to lean against the back of the sofa.

‘Why was it so important to you?’ Angela asked. ‘And who are you anyway?’

‘You don’t need to know that.’

Suddenly, Angela realized she had no idea where Chris was or what had happened to him on the street.

‘Where’s Chris?’ she asked, the pitch of her voice rising as anxiety swept through her. ‘The man I was with. I’m not going to do what you want until you tell me what happened to him.’

The man smiled then, but it wasn’t an expression of reassurance, rather a look of mild and disinterested amusement, the kind of look an indulgent parent might bestow on a wayward child.

‘I’ve no idea where that man is right now,’ he said. ‘I don’t even know whether he’s alive or dead. When my men left him, he was unconscious – taken a nasty blow to the head. That might have been enough to kill him, or caused brain damage, or perhaps only given him a really bad headache. Frankly, I neither know nor care. It simply doesn’t matter.’

‘It matters to me,’ Angela snapped.

‘Well, it won’t for much longer. We know that you work for the British Museum in London and-’

‘How do you know that? How do you know that I work for the museum?’

‘We have our sources. And that’s the only reason you’re here. You must have looked at the book you took from the tomb. If you did, you’ll know why it’s important. Now you’ll supply us with a translation of what it says.’

Angela shook her head. ‘I’m not a linguist,’ she said. ‘I work with ceramics. And in any case, that book is just a diary.’

‘How do you know that,’ the man asked mildly, ‘if you can’t read Latin?’

‘OK, I’m fairly familiar with Latin, and I did translate some of it. But what I said is true: it’s just a diary.’

The man shook his head. ‘That book is far more than just a diary. The first section is a chronicle of events, yes, but that isn’t the part we’re interested in. It’s the last dozen or so pages – what’s written there is very different.’

‘I didn’t do more than just look at that section,’ Angela pointed out.

‘Well, now you’re going to translate all of it.’

‘Why? What could possibly be so important in a two-hundred-year-old diary? Important enough to justify all this?’ Angela made a sweeping gesture to encompass the entire house and whatever lay outside the building.

‘We’re looking for something.’

‘I guessed that. What?’

‘A source document. A document that’s older, hundreds of years older, than this diary. Twelfth century, in fact.’

Despite her situation, and her worries about Bronson, Angela felt her pulse quicken. Once history grabbed you, it never let go, and ancient texts had always held a special fascination for her.

‘What document?’ she asked.

An expression that could have been a smile flickered across the man’s face. ‘We don’t know what it’s called, but we do know that it exists. Or at least that it existed.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because we’ve seen copies of copies of different parts of it – many of them to some extent contradictory. We believe that this diary might tell us exactly where to look for the original.’

Angela frowned. ‘I don’t understand. This diary – or whatever you want to call it – was written by a woman almost two centuries ago, and has been locked up inside her tomb since she died. How can you possibly know it contains information about this other document?’

‘We’ve always known about the diary. We just didn’t know where it was. The Paganinis were somewhat notorious in Venice, and we’ve studied the family archives. Carmelita Paganini’s tomb was the next place we wanted to search, but we didn’t know where it was.’

‘It looked to me as if somebody had erased her name from the slab covering the grave,’ Angela said.

‘Exactly. Carmelita was an embarrassment while she was alive, and even more so when she was dead, at least to some members of the Paganini dynasty.’

‘The brick in the mouth? They thought she was a vampire?’

‘A primitive attempt to destroy her, but completely pointless. Carmelita Paganini wasn’t a vampire – she just thought she was. She spent her life trying to achieve that nobility, but it’s clear she never managed it. The crumbling bones in her grave are proof enough of that.’

‘ Nobility? ’ Angela asked.

The man smiled again. ‘That seems to us to be an entirely appropriate term to use when referring to a higher form of life, to something superhuman.’

Angela opened her mouth to deliver a sharp retort, but then she glanced around at the other men and thought better of it.

‘So this source document,’ she asked instead. ‘What do you know about it?’

‘We don’t know its name, so we just call it “The Source”. It was written in the early twelfth century, apparently by a lapsed monk who lived in part of the country that’s now called Hungary.’

‘It was called Hungary then as well,’ Angela pointed out. ‘It’s one of the oldest countries in Europe.’

The man shrugged. ‘Whatever. We’ve found several references to it in various archives, and some of them talked about a book written by Carmelita Paganini. According to one contemporary account, she’d not only seen the original text, the source document itself, and incorporated some of the passages into her diary, but also knew where it was hidden. That’s why we’ve been so keen to find it, and why you’ll now assist us by translating Carmelita’s diary.’

‘And why should I help you?’ Angela said. ‘You’ve attacked me on the street and kidnapped me. What makes you think that I’ll do anything to help you?’

‘I’m sure we can persuade you. I think you’re right-handed,’ the man replied, ‘so we’ll start with your left hand.’

Angela stared up at him, her blood turning to ice. ‘What do you mean?’ she demanded.

‘Let me show you,’ the man replied. He turned to one of the other men and issued a crisp instruction in Italian.

After a few moments the second man returned, carrying a jar perhaps six inches high and three or four in diameter, fitted with an airtight lid. It looked to Angela like a small version of one of the old Kilner jars her mother had used years ago for bottling fruit. Inside it was an almost colourless liquid in which several small pale objects were submerged.

‘What’s that?’ Angela demanded.

‘I suppose you could call them souvenirs,’ the man said, moving the jar closer to Angela’s face. ‘You’re not the first person we’ve needed to – what shall we say? – motivate – to assist us with the translations and other matters.’

For a few moments Angela stared at the objects inside the jar uncomprehendingly, then she recoiled with a gasp of disgust. What she had first assumed were some kind of vegetables – carrots, perhaps, or parsnips – were actually the severed joints of human fingers.

‘Every time you refuse to do what we ask, we’ll remove a part of one of the fingers on your left hand,’ the man continued. ‘You won’t bleed to death, because we will cauterize the wound with a soldering iron. One of my men particularly enjoys doing the amputations. He uses a pair of bolt croppers if he’s in a good mood. But if you annoy him, he’ll do it by clamping your finger between a couple of pieces of wood and using a hacksaw. That takes longer, and there’s a lot more blood, but he doesn’t seem to mind that.’

Angela tore her horrified gaze from the revolting contents of the jar and looked up into the man’s face. ‘You utter bastard,’ she muttered.

The man shook his head. ‘Abuse won’t help you,’ he said. ‘In fact, nothing can help you now. You’ve seen our faces, and we simply can’t afford to let you tell anybody else what you’ve seen.’

For a few seconds Angela just sat there, numbly digesting the explicit threat. Because this was the point. She had seen their faces, and she knew with a terrifying sense of certainty that she would never be allowed to leave the island alive.

The man – whoever he was – had just casually delivered her death sentence.