The Nosferatu Scroll

37

Angela had woken stiff and aching from her fitful sleep on the sofa, and had been allowed to wash in a bathroom adjacent to the lavatory she’d used the previous day. Her breakfast had consisted of a plate of pastries and coffee, and as soon as she’d finished it, Marco had told her to carry on working on the translation.

She had acquired her knowledge of Latin over the years that she’d worked at the British Museum, building on the lessons in the dead language she’d enjoyed at school, more years ago than she could now contemplate with any degree of comfort. But try as she might to concentrate on the words in front of her, her thoughts kept returning to the awful reality of her situation and, inescapably, to Chris. She had no idea whether he was alive or dead. If he was alive, if he’d survived the attack on the street, she knew he’d be trying to find her, and would be frantic with worry. But how on earth would he be able to track her down?

She had no idea how long she’d spent in a drug-induced state of unconsciousness, but it must have been several hours, perhaps even days, and it was entirely possible that she was no longer in Venice at all. Her only reassurance was that her captors spoke together in Italian, which presumably meant that she was still in Italy. But even that, she had to acknowledge, was actually pure conjecture. It was just as possible that she’d been snatched by a gang of Italians, and then taken to some other country entirely.

And she’d found the coolly dispassionate attitude of her captors enormously alarming. She really believed that any one of them could kill her with as little compunction or concern as he would exhibit if he swatted a fly. As far as she could see, the only reason she was still alive at that moment was because they needed her translation skills, and Marco – or whatever his real name was – had implied that they only wanted to see her version of the ancient text to check that whoever else they had employed to decipher it had got it right.

That meant they already had a good idea of what the Latin text said, which in turn meant that she had to do a reasonably good job herself. But not a perfect job, she decided. Perhaps she would make a handful of trifling errors in the translation – errors that she could explain away because of her unfamiliarity with Latin, and which might mean they would keep her alive for a bit longer while they ensured that she’d done the best job she could, and that the text she’d produced was accurate. That was the only thing she could think of doing to make her abductors think twice before killing her. And the longer she stayed alive, Angela knew, the better the chances of her finding some way of getting out of the house – wherever it was – and escaping. And maybe somebody, Chris or the police or even the occupants of a neighbouring property, if there was one, might discover where she was being held prisoner. It was a cliche, obviously, but it was just as obviously true: while there was life, there really was hope.

Angela dabbed her eyes angrily with a tissue, cleared her mind of all extraneous thoughts, and again focused on the task at hand.

Quite a lot of the Latin words were familiar to her. One of the advantages of learning Latin was that it had an essentially finite vocabulary, unlike English and other modern languages in common usage, which acquire new words, new meanings and new variants of existing words on an almost daily basis. Once you knew the meaning of a Latin word, you knew it for ever, because it would never change.

She remembered most of the declensions and many of the conjugations of verbs, and she was able to jot down the general sense of several of the sentences quite quickly, just leaving a handful of blanks for the words that she was either unfamiliar with or unsure of. Then she’d open the dictionary and flick through the pages until she found the first word she needed to check. Then she’d fill in the meaning, and move on to the next word. When she’d finished each sentence she paused for a moment to read it in its entirety, to make sure that it made sense, then re-wrote it in modern English.

The translation itself had proved to be relatively straight-forward, but she soon realized what Marco had meant when he referred to ‘unusual aspects’ in the text. Although the references to the tomb of the twin angels still seemed fairly clear, other passages in the Latin were ambiguous at best, and she was increasingly unsure whether or not she was getting it right. In some passages, Carmelita had referred to the Isola di San Michele as the insula silenti, the phrase translating as the ‘island of the dead’, but there were several occurrences of an entirely different phrase – insula vetus mortuus – which puzzled her.

Her literal translation rendered this as the island of the ‘ancient dead’ or ‘old dead’, which she really didn’t understand. It wasn’t clear to her whether Carmelita was using the expression as a synonym for San Michele, or if she meant somewhere completely different, possibly a more ancient graveyard located elsewhere in Venice.

And there was another phrase which sent a chill through her. The pages referred to planctus mortuus, which translated as the ‘wailing dead’ or the ‘screaming dead’. ‘Dead’, as far as she was concerned, meant exactly that: death, the cessation of life. The dead could neither scream nor wail. But the same expression appeared in several places in the text, and the context suggested that Carmelita was referring to a specific place where the dead had screamed.

Angela shook her head and continued working through the text.