The Nosferatu Scroll

44

Angela looked up at Marco. He seemed strangely subdued by her mention of the island.

‘What is it about Poveglia?’ she asked.

He stared at her for a moment, then shook his head. ‘You really don’t know?’ he replied. ‘Your ignorance staggers me.’

He reached forward, plucked a book out of the pile on the desk and slammed it down in front of her. ‘It’s all in here,’ he snapped. ‘Read it and educate yourself.’

Pulling a mobile phone from his pocket, Marco stalked across to the other side of the drawing-room and held a brief conversation with someone. It sounded as if he was issuing orders.

Angela glanced after him, then down at the book. It looked like a fairly typical multi-language tourist guide to Venice, but the title promised that it would reveal the hidden stories of the Venetian lagoon: ‘the Venice that tourists never see’, as the author claimed. The introduction pointed out that the city hosted around three million tourists every year, although most of them never got beyond Venice itself and the islands of Murano and Burano. There was a short chapter that dealt only with Poveglia, and by the time she’d finished reading it, Angela knew exactly why Carmelita had talked about the ‘ancient dead’ and the ‘screaming dead’.

The dead on Poveglia greatly outnumbered the living in Venice. The island was covered in plague pits, a legacy of one of the most terrible periods in Venetian history. In the outbreak of 1576 alone, it was estimated that fifty thousand people had died from bubonic plague. Fifty thousand was only about ten thousand less than the total population of the old city today. And there had been at least twenty-two attacks of the plague before that one. According to some calculations, the bones of over one hundred and sixty thousand people lay in shallow graves on Poveglia.

The island had been used as a lazaretto, a quarantine station, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in an attempt to prevent the spread of infectious diseases to Venice. The city was a maritime republic, almost entirely dependent upon trade for its survival, and visiting traders who wished to step ashore in Venice would first be required to undergo a lengthy period of isolation. In fact, it was the Venetians who invented the concept of quarantine, the word deriving from the Italian quaranta giorni, or ‘forty days’.

But even this procedure clearly hadn’t protected the city from the ravages of the Black Death, as the sheer number of deaths throughout that period bore witness. The city authorities had been ruthless in their attempts to keep Venice clear of the plague. Anyone displaying the slightest signs of infection would be shipped out immediately to Poveglia or one of the other lazarettos in the lagoon. One island was actually named after this function: Lazzaretto Nuovo.

According to the author of the book, it was popularly believed that weak but still-living victims of the plague were either tossed on the burning funeral pyres or thrown into the plague pits amongst the decomposing bodies, and then buried alive. Angela thought that the expression ‘screaming dead’ barely even hinted at the horrific events that must have taken place on Poveglia some half a millennium earlier.

And the horrors apparently hadn’t stopped there. Much later, in the early twentieth century, a mental hospital had been built on the island. Some of the inmates had reportedly been subjected to inhuman tortures, mutilated and then butchered by a notoriously sadistic doctor. This man had apparently then gone mad himself, and had climbed to the top of the old bell tower and jumped to his death.

It was no wonder that the island was hardly ever mentioned in the guidebooks, and was almost never visited. In fact, the book stated that Poveglia was officially off-limits to everyone, locals and visitors. Angela couldn’t think of a single reason why anyone could possibly want to go there. And that, of course, meant that it would provide an excellent hiding place for the ancient document Marco was seeking.

She put the book to one side and turned back to her translation, but the text didn’t seem to provide any further details of where the source document might be hidden. Angela looked at the detailed map that was included in the chapter on Poveglia, jotted down a few notes, principally dates and events, and then sat back.

She didn’t think it would have been buried in the ground somewhere, not least because of the plague pits that were the dominant feature of the island’s soil, so that left one of the ruined buildings on Poveglia. The document couldn’t possibly be hidden in the lunatic asylum – part of which had apparently also been used as a retirement home for senior citizens, a thought which made Angela shudder again – because the building hadn’t been erected until 1922. Several of the other structures were also comparatively recent, certainly built after Carmelita’s death.

The oldest structure on the island was the bell tower, the only surviving remnant of the twelfth-century church of San Vitale, which had been abandoned and then destroyed hundreds of years earlier. The translation Angela had completed was quite specific. It stated that after the source document had been prepared it had then been secreted beside the guardian in the new place where the legions of the dead reign supreme. Apart from the reference to the ‘guardian’, which still bothered her because she didn’t fully understand it, the meaning was perfectly clear. The document had originally been hidden somewhere else but, after Carmelita had seen it, for some reason it had then been concealed in a different hiding place.

If her reading of the Latin was correct, and assuming the document still existed, that meant there was only one place it could possibly have been hidden on Poveglia: it had to be somewhere in the bell tower.