The Nosferatu Scroll

50

Marco released Angela’s handcuffs, and led her out of the cabin. The boat was already moored, a bow and stern line attached, and it was easy enough to step from the side of the vessel onto the landing stage. She looked around. The boat was positioned a short distance down the channel between the small octagonal island that lay at the southern tip of Poveglia and the middle island. In the distance, looking south, she could make out buildings on the Lido.

The octagonal island looked like a flat-topped fort, the inward-sloping sides made of stone, and mooring alongside that would have been difficult. But that wasn’t their objective. A short distance along the level stone landing stage that marked the southern end of the larger island was an impressive-looking building. It reminded Angela of a typical Venetian palazzo, and must, she thought, have been part of the retirement home on the island, before being abandoned in the 1960s. The facade was covered with a web-like exoskeleton of rusting scaffolding. That, Angela knew from her research, was not part of some renovation project, but had been erected almost a quarter of a century earlier simply to stop the buildings from falling down.

She looked over to the north-east, and there, beyond the trees, rose the imposing stone bell tower, looking something like a church steeple, its tall red-tiled roof supporting a large metal crucifix at the very top. All the openings in the tower appeared to have been bricked up, possibly when the scaffolding was put in place. A chill wind blew in suddenly from the waters of the lagoon, bringing with it a swirl of mist, and from somewhere nearby Angela heard the faint sound of a bell ringing.

She glanced at Marco. ‘Did you hear that bell?’ she asked, and pointed towards the tower. ‘I thought it came from over there.’

He looked at her dismissively. ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘The bell was removed in nineteen thirteen.’

‘I know what I heard,’ Angela insisted, but her voice lacked conviction. She’d read in the guidebook that the sound of a bell was still sometimes heard on the island.

The hooded man emerged from the cabin of the boat and began moving silently – his feet never seemed to make a sound – towards the derelict building that lay closest to the tower.

Marco checked that Angela’s handcuffs were still secured, and then pushed her in the same direction, two of his men following behind.

The short procession entered the building through an opening that had obviously once been a doorway, but which now gaped open to the elements. Inside, it was a scene of almost total devastation. Rubbish and debris lay strewn across the floor. Plaster had fallen off the walls and ceiling, and in several places the floor timbers of the storey above had broken, and pointed downwards into the ground-floor room like long, blackened and jagged teeth. On many of the pieces of surviving plaster, graffiti had been scrawled. Cast-iron radiators stood forlornly against the walls, rust covering the areas where the paint had flaked off. In one corner, two windows had disappeared, and a heavy growth of vegetation had forced its way inside and was beginning the long slow process of reclaiming the building.

Angela was not of a nervous disposition, but she knew absolutely that if she had had any choice in the matter, she would have walked out, climbed back on to the boat and never, ever returned to Poveglia.

The very fabric of the building seemed to echo with the cries of the dying, and the knowledge that the thin soil on the island covered the bones of tens of thousands of plague victims weighed heavily upon her. If there was any place on the face of the earth where the dead could speak, this, this island of Poveglia, was probably it. She could so easily imagine the giant fires consuming piles of smouldering bodies, and the shallow graves tended by workers who were themselves diseased. Through it all would stalk the bizarre and otherworldly figures of the doctors, trying vainly to fight a contagion that they didn’t understand and could not cure, their only protection against the disease being the hook-nosed masks they wore, filled with peppers and spices which they believed might filter out the infective elements. These men must have looked like massive predatory birds as they tried in vain to bring some relief to the sufferers.

Suddenly, a movement caught her eye and Angela gave a little cry of alarm. A shadow played across the wall as a beam of sunlight entered the building, and she could almost swear that she saw the shape of a man wearing a beak-like mask somewhere outside the building. Then the wind blew again and the shape dissolved and reformed, as the branches of the tree shifted.

‘Come on,’ Marco ordered, tugging at Angela’s arm.

Following the hooded man, they stepped over and around the debris to the far end of the room and made their way carefully over to the bell tower.

Inside, little light penetrated because the windows and other openings had been bricked up. The tower extended above their heads, a vertical well of darkness. In the gloom, they saw the first few steps of a rusting spiral staircase which ran around the walls of the tower.

‘So where is it?’ Marco demanded.

For an instant, Angela didn’t realize that he was talking to her, then she pulled herself together.

‘The text doesn’t say,’ she replied. ‘It just seems to suggest that it’s hidden somewhere here, in this place. There’s nothing else I can tell you, and I did translate all the rest of the Latin.’

Marco looked at her for a long moment, then switched his glance to the stairs before turning to one of his men and issuing a crisp order in Italian. The man turned and strode swiftly out of the tower.

‘We need torches,’ he said. ‘I don’t think the document is hidden anywhere down here. People still come to this island – you can tell that from the graffiti they’ve scrawled on the walls – and if it had been found already, we would have known about it. So it’s probably hidden somewhere that people wouldn’t normally visit or explore.’ He looked again at Angela. ‘I hope you’re not afraid of heights,’ he said, ‘because my guess is that Carmelita, or whoever hid it, probably put it right at the top of the bell tower. You’re going up there to find it for us.’

When the man he’d sent back to the boat returned, half a dozen torches of different sizes in his hands, Marco stepped across to Angela and unlocked her handcuffs. Then he picked up the biggest torch, a squat, grey and clearly heavy instrument with a rechargeable battery, and shone a powerful beam directly upwards, tracing the course that the spiral staircase followed until it reached a level platform.

‘That can’t be the top of the tower,’ Marco said. ‘It’s not high enough. There must be another staircase above that.’

‘I don’t want to do this,’ Angela murmured. ‘I really don’t want to go up there.’

Marco shrugged. ‘You’ve got two choices. Do this and you’ll live, at least for a little while longer. Refuse, and I’ll have one of my men strangle you right now and dump your body here. It’s up to you.’

For a few seconds Angela stared at him, but she knew she had no option. She was quite certain that Marco would order her death with as little compunction as he would order a cup of coffee. She grimaced, reached down and picked up two of the smaller torches, then she strode across to the foot of the spiral staircase.

She switched on one of the torches and shone the beam at the metal treads in front of her. There was little dust or debris visible on them, and even the banister appeared to be intact and in reasonably good condition. She guessed that some of the infrequent and illegal visitors to the island probably climbed at least some distance up into the tower out of idle curiosity, if nothing else. That was good news, because it meant that the staircase should support her weight. Cautiously, she rested her left foot on the lowest tread, then began to climb.

Behind her, she heard the sound of footsteps and glanced back: Marco was following, torch in hand.

‘Keep going,’ he snapped. ‘I’m just here to make sure you do what you’re told.’

The staircase wound up the inside of the tower. For the first few steps, it felt extremely solid, but the higher she climbed the more unhappy Angela felt, realizing she was relying on bolts and fittings that had been in place for a very long time, without the benefit of any kind of maintenance or repair. She moved as close as she could to the wall, where she hoped the old metal might be stronger, and tested each step before she put her full weight on it.

The climb seemed endless, but eventually she stepped on to a platform that she guessed was virtually at the top of the main part of the tower, and looked around. Again, there was graffiti on the walls, which meant that other people had made the same climb fairly recently. There was no obvious hiding place at that level.

Marco appeared beside her within seconds. ‘I told you the bell had been removed,’ he said, pointing at a substantial beam that ran from one wall of the tower to the opposite side, and which had clearly been designed to support some heavy object.

‘I did hear something,’ Angela insisted.

She looked at the walls of the bell chamber, and at the bricked-up openings in the side walls, and shivered.

‘I suppose this was where he jumped from?’ she said quietly.

‘Who?’ Marco asked.

‘The mad doctor. If the story about him in that book was true, I mean.’

‘Nobody knows, and I don’t care.’ Marco looked all around them, quickly reaching the same conclusion as Angela. ‘There’s nothing here,’ he said. ‘We need to get to the very top.’

Another short flight of stairs brought them to a second level, above the old bell chamber. And the stairs stopped there. Attached to one wall was a steel ladder, around which metal hoops had been bolted to prevent anyone climbing it from falling off. Like the spiral staircase, the metal looked old and rusty, and none too safe.

‘Keep going,’ Marco ordered again.

Angela swallowed hard. Heights didn’t particularly bother her, but she had a horror of falling, and even the metal hoops around the ladder weren’t much of a safe-guard against that happening. But she knew she had no option. She tucked both the torches into the waistband of her trousers, because she’d definitely need both hands free to make the climb, then reached up and began the ascent.

It wasn’t a long climb, perhaps twenty steps in all, and at the top she was faced with a wooden trapdoor set into the underside of a narrow platform. There was no bolt or catch, and the trapdoor swung open fairly easily as she pushed up on it. As it swung back against the wall with a dull thud, she took out one of the torches and shone the beam into the void above. Apart from an old broom, it appeared to be completely empty.

She reached up and placed both torches on the floor of the small platform, then heaved herself through the hole and stood up.

Angela could see that Marco was just beginning to make the same climb, and for a fleeting instant she debated dropping some heavy object down on to the top of his head, but then dismissed the thought. Even if she succeeded in hitting him, she would still have to contend with the men waiting on the ground floor down below, and if Marco didn’t reappear, she guessed that she wouldn’t leave the tower alive.

The platform was about eight feet long and three feet wide, and the walls appeared to be just as solid and featureless as those on the two platforms below her. As far she could see, there was nowhere here where anything of any size could be concealed.

Marco pulled himself through the trapdoor and stood next to her. ‘What now?’ he demanded. ‘Where is it?’

Angela shook her head in despair. ‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘I can only tell you what I translated from the Latin text. That didn’t give any indication of where the document might be hidden, apart from mentioning this tower, and even that was far from explicit.’ She looked around at the featureless walls of the platform. ‘If it was ever here, maybe somebody found it and removed it, years ago.’

‘I’ve already told you: if it had been found, we would know about it. It must be here somewhere.’

‘But there’s no possible hiding place here.’

Then a thought struck her and she walked back to the trapdoor and peered down the square-sided shaft up which they had both climbed. She turned back to Marco.

‘How high do you think we’ve climbed?’ she asked.

‘Why?’

‘Because the walls are square,’ she replied. ‘At the top of this tower is a tall steeple. If we’d climbed to the very top of the tower, the walls would meet at a point above our heads. There must still be a space somewhere above us.’

Marco glanced down through the trapdoor, then looked around and nodded. ‘So where’s the access?’ he asked.

The ceiling of the space they were standing in was only about seven feet above their heads. Angela didn’t reply, but simply picked up the broom and began gently tapping its handle against the ceiling. It didn’t take long to cover the small space, and in one corner this technique generated a hollow-sounding thud.

‘Here,’ she said, and shone the torch beam at the ceiling. Almost invisible in the grubby whitewash that covered the ceiling was the outline of an oblong shape. If they hadn’t been looking for it, there was no way they would ever have seen it. At one end of it was a small hole, inside which a few strands of frayed material could be seen poking out.

‘What’s that?’

‘I think it’s the end of a length of rope, probably used to pull the trapdoor closed from here. And then they cut the rest off to hide the fact there was an opening in the ceiling. Just hold this,’ Angela snapped, the spirit of the quest taking over, despite the circumstances. She passed the torch to Marco, who looked surprised, but did as she had told him and aimed the beam where she indicated.

She pressed her hands firmly against one end of the oblong mark and pushed upwards. There was a creaking and tearing sound, the noise of old dry wood moving against a solid object, and the section of ceiling lifted a fraction of an inch. She changed position, and pushed again, but the panel wouldn’t budge.

‘You hold the torch and I’ll lift it,’ Marco told her.

Angela took a few paces backwards and aimed the beam of her torch at the ceiling. Marco raised his arms and shoved against the wood. Nothing happened, so he stepped back a few inches and tried again, his face contorted from the effort. With a final snapping sound, the panel suddenly gave way and flew upwards.

A cloud of dust and small pieces of wood cascaded down over his head. Angela looked on in horror as a skeletal arm, held together within a carapace of leathery skin, swung down, the bony hand seeming almost to grab for Marco. Above his head, framed in the dark opening, she found herself staring into the sightless eye sockets of a partially fleshed human skull.