The Nosferatu Scroll

58

Angela sat at the desk and stared down at the text she was translating. In her work at the British Museum, she had quite often had to translate passages of Latin, usually sections of very old documents or inscriptions that dated back almost two millennia to the height of the Roman Empire, and she’d become familiar with the syntax and sentence construction of writings from that period.

But she’d also worked on documents that were much more recent, everything from documents produced at the height of the Byzantine Empire at the end of the First Millennium through mediaeval texts and all the way to passages that were only a couple of hundred years old. It had always fascinated her the way that Latin, though essentially ‘dead’ and unchanging, had been adapted by its users to the changing patterns of speech and writing over the centuries. It was sometimes possible to estimate the age of a piece of text simply from the way the Latin had been written, by the words that were used.

And what she was working on now was clearly much more ancient than the bulk of the diary that she’d seen before. The syntax suggested it was probably late mediaeval, dating from between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, hundreds of years before Carmelita Paganini had started keeping her journal. That suggested that Marco had been right in the date he’d ascribed to the scroll.

On one level, Angela was quite enjoying what she was doing, working out the meaning of the Latin sentences and transcribing them into clear and understandable English. But even as she worked, a growing sense of foreboding was creeping over her, a foreboding that gave way to a kind of numb resignation as she understood the full implications of the information contained in the scroll. Even the title of the text was disturbing, though not entirely a surprise: The Noble Vampyr.

Once she’d completed what Marco had told her to do with the genealogy, just confirming the link, the bloodline, which existed between Nicodema Diluca and the so-called Vampire Princess, she’d started working on the next page. But she hadn’t needed to translate the initial section, because within a few minutes she’d realized that it was almost exactly the same as the Latin she’d already seen in the leather-bound diary, and had presumably been copied from the same source. This part of the scroll appeared to be essentially an introduction to the topic and included the attempt to justify the ridiculous claims that the author had made and which Angela had already translated.

But the second section of the manuscript was highly specific about vampires. It explained at some length about the way vampires were supposed to live and, according to the unidentified author, the reality was a far cry from the romantic images of suave, well-dressed vampires of the twentieth century drinking the blood of their willing victims. Clearly, none of the more contemporary writers had referred to this text or to any other ancient source documents that might have contained similar descriptions.

According to this treatise, vampires were both cannibalistic – which was hardly a surprise, given that their favourite diet was supposed to be blood drunk from the necks of nubile young girls – and scavengers. In fact, according to the translated text, the favourite hunting grounds of vampires were graveyards, where they would break into the tombs of recent burials and feast on the decaying flesh of the bodies they found there. The only inviolate rule was that the bodies of former vampires – the discarded hosts, as it were – were considered to be noble, and were never to be consumed.

The most reliable way to identify a vampire, the author of the text asserted, was by the smell of rotting meat which they invariably exuded, and which normally caused them to be shunned by mere mortals. But this, the author then explained, was a small price for the vampire to pay in exchange for the priceless gift of eternal life.

As she finished translating this particular sentence, Angela shuddered at her recollection of the hooded man and the appalling smell that seemed to surround him like a miasma. Whoever he was, he was clearly the leader of this group of deranged men, and had presumably decided to make himself seem as much like an authentic vampire as he could. She guessed that somewhere under his black robe he was carrying a piece of decaying meat to produce the odour she had smelt.

She shook her head and returned to the translation.

The next few sentences dealt with the misguided and usually futile attempts to kill vampires, attempts that the text stated were frequently mounted by people who simply failed to appreciate the inherent nobility of the vampire. Then the only guaranteed ways by which the death of a vampire might be achieved were specified in some detail. The most effective method was for the heart of the creature to be removed from the body and buried separately – as far away from the vampire as possible.

Decapitation also worked, but driving a wooden stake through the heart was, in the opinion of the author, useless because the heart remained in place, and the heart of a vampire was so powerful that nothing short of its removal from the body would guarantee death. Similar derision was reserved for the idea of placing some object – a brick or a length of timber – in the mouth of the vampire, and the author cited two cases that he had known of personally where a body had been buried with a brick driven into the jaw, and where the vampire had risen effortlessly from the grave after biting through the offending object. Again, he failed to be specific about where and when these alleged events were supposed to have occurred.

What bothered Angela the most about the text was the author’s matter-of-fact acceptance of the existence of vampires. From the tone of his descriptions, he could have been talking about any natural phenomenon with which he would have expected most of his readers to be familiar. It was as if, at the time the author was writing, vampires were regular and accepted members of society who simply lived very different lives to most of the people around them.

Angela found such an attitude impossible to accept, and she repeatedly checked the text for any sign that the author was being less than completely serious. But there was no indication that this was the case. Whoever had created the original text was apparently absolutely factual in what he was describing – or, at least, he appeared to believe he was being absolutely factual. He was certainly convinced of the reality of the vampire as a living and breathing – albeit undead – member of the society in which he lived.

Again, Angela wished she had some idea who the author had been, and where and in which period he’d lived. She was still certain, from the Latin syntax, that the time period was roughly mediaeval, but beyond that she hadn’t been able to pin it down.

She read the English translation she had prepared for a second time, then held it up to Marco, who walked over to the desk and took it from her with a nod.

Then she sighed deeply, and read the first sentence of the Latin text that formed the third part of the treatise written on the scroll: the section of the document which she now understood contained detailed instructions on how anyone who wished to do so could become a vampire themselves.