The Nosferatu Scroll

48

About an hour later, Angela was taken out of the main door of the house into the pale watery light of a cloudy afternoon in the Venetian lagoon.

After the hooded man had left the drawing-room, Marco had instructed her to make a complete translation of the rest of that section of the diary as quickly as possible, obviously hoping that the remainder of the Latin text would provide details of the precise location of the source document. It didn’t. The only reference Angela found was to the ‘campanile of light’, which just served to confirm her assumption that the document must be somewhere in the ancient bell tower. From her reading of the chapter dealing with the history of Poveglia, she knew that the bell tower had for a time been converted into a lighthouse. But she still had no idea exactly where to start looking.

Marco and another of his men hustled her down the path towards the jetty at the end of the island, where two men were already waiting, standing in the stern of a powerboat, the rumble of the engine clearly audible.

‘Why do you want me to go with you?’ Angela asked, as Marco pushed her inside the small cabin.

‘You’ve read and translated the Latin,’ he replied. ‘We don’t know what we’ll find when we get there, but there might be something, some clue, that you’ll see and understand but we won’t. That’s why you’re here.’

‘What happens if you don’t find what you’re looking for?’

‘You’d better pray that we do. Finding the source document is the only thing that’s keeping you alive right now. If it isn’t there, then we have no further use for you.’

The casual, almost conversational, tone of his voice scared Angela even more than the words he’d used, and she sat in silence as Marco handcuffed her wrists together, looping the link between the cuffs behind a hand rail, immobilizing her. Then he left the cabin.

A few moments later the door opened again and the hooded man entered, the now familiar stench preceding him. Angela shrank back in her seat as the figure passed right beside her, and then took a seat at the opposite end of the cabin.

Moments later, she felt the boat start to move, and soon the bow was cutting through the choppy waters of the lagoon, the waves thumping rhythmically against the hull.

She had no idea how long the journey would take, because she didn’t know where she’d been imprisoned, and the view through the side windows of the boat was so restricted that she could see almost nothing of her surroundings. And in truth, her thoughts were dominated by the hooded man she was sharing the cabin with. He had said nothing to her, and gave no sign that he was even aware of her presence, but the all-pervasive smell of rotting meat seemed to fill the air, and she was simply terrified in case he came close or, worse, touched her.

A few minutes later, Marco returned to the cabin and sat down opposite Angela, which actually made her feel safer and slightly more comfortable. At least the menace Marco represented was clear and tangible. The hooded man inspired only feelings of horror and revulsion, which were far worse than any physical threat.

‘Who is that man?’ she asked quietly, nodding towards the silent figure. ‘He terrifies me.’

Marco smiled bleakly. ‘He should.’