The Nosferatu Scroll

34

Apart from a few visits to the loo, each time accompanied by one of her silent and unsmiling guards to the door of a ground-floor lavatory – which had a barred window and no internal lock or bolt – Angela hadn’t left the elegant room in the house since she’d arrived. Early in the evening, a tray of food had been put in front of her, and around midnight she’d eventually tried to get some sleep on the wide sofa in front of the fireplace.

But she hadn’t been idle that evening. The suave but indescribably menacing man had seen to that. He had finally introduced himself as ‘Marco’, but she had no idea if that was what he was actually called or just a convenient name he’d pulled out of the air.

As soon as he’d shown her the appalling collection of ‘souvenirs’, Angela had realized that cooperation with her captors was hardly a choice: it was an absolute necessity if she was to avoid the agonizing mutilation that the group was so obviously capable of inflicting. So when Marco had asked if she was prepared to complete the translations, she’d simply nodded her agreement.

She’d been led across to a large oak desk set in one corner, and been told to sit on a leather swivel chair right in front of it, an incongruously modern piece of furniture in the elegant and old-fashioned room. Even those few steps across the polished wooden floor left her feeling as weak as a kitten: presumably she’d been pumped full of a cocktail of drugs to keep her quiet while they transported her to the house – wherever it was – and her body was still feeling the after effects. She knew that trying to fight her captors or run out of the room would be completely futile. Before she could do anything to try to escape, she would have to wait until she’d regained her strength. And she also needed to find out a lot more about the house in which she was being held prisoner, and its location. And especially what lay outside the windows.

On the desk was a selection of reference books of various types, the majority clearly written in English, about half a dozen pencils, roughly half a ream of white paper, the battered leather-bound diary itself, and two separate piles of pages which she saw immediately were photocopies of the diary entries.

Marco had pointed to those two sets of pages. ‘Ignore the one on the left,’ he said. ‘Those are just records of Carmelita’s life: interesting but not important for us. The other section is the one we’re interested in. You can start translating that right now.’

Angela shook her head. ‘I’ll need a Latin dictionary,’ she said. ‘I don’t have the vocabulary to translate this. Can you find one on the Internet for me?’

Marco laughed shortly. ‘We’re not going to let you anywhere near a computer,’ he said. Then he searched quickly through the pile of books at the back of the desk and selected a Latin-Italian dictionary.

Angela opened her mouth to point out that she didn’t speak Italian, but before she could say anything, he had found another dictionary, this time a Latin-English version, and the words of protest died in her throat.

‘And when I’ve finished?’ Angela had asked. ‘What then? You’ll shoot me? Is that it?’

Marco had shaken his head. ‘I think we can find a more interesting way to usher you into the next life,’ he’d said. ‘But I do have some good news for you.’

‘What?’

‘If you do a good job, you’ll still be alive tomorrow. But after that, I can’t promise you anything. And before you start work, let me point out that we’ve already translated some of the text ourselves, so we’ll know if your version is accurate.’

‘If you’ve done that, then why do you need me at all?’ Angela had asked.

‘You English have an expression about a gift horse. If we don’t need you to do the translation, then we don’t need you at all, so just be grateful. But it’s not just translating the Latin. There are some unusual aspects of the text that we haven’t been able to make sense of. That’s the real reason why we want you to work on it.’

Without another word Angela had pulled the dictionary across in front of her, picked up a pencil and looked at the first sentence.