The Nosferatu Scroll

67

Angela’s eyes flickered open and she looked around her. Or rather, she tried to, because wherever she looked she could see absolutely nothing. Impenetrable, Stygian blackness surrounded her. For a moment, she wondered if she was actually blindfolded, if somebody had put something over her head or her eyes to block out the light. She lifted her right hand to her face and felt her cheeks and eyelids and mouth, and realized that wasn’t the case.

She sucked in a deep breath through her mouth. She knew she was in a very, very dark room, and for several seconds the confusion in her mind almost overwhelmed her, and she had no idea where she was or what had happened to her, or what had caused the dull ache she could feel in the centre of her chest between and below her breasts. Her nerves seemed to be screaming at the after effects of some trauma and her whole body was trembling in shock.

And then she remembered Marco’s instruction to the two men, to put her in the cellar. And with a sudden rush she also remembered fighting them every inch of the way, outside the house and along a gravel path, until one of the men had pulled out some kind of a gun and shot her. Instantly, her hand flew to her torso, her fingers probing for the bullet hole that she fully expected to find there. But that made no sense. If she’d been shot in the chest, she’d be dead, wouldn’t she?

‘What happened to me?’ she muttered. She lifted her hands to her face, and only then heard the clanking of a chain next to her and felt the pressure of the handcuff which had been secured around her left wrist.

Then, from somewhere quite close by she heard a voice and realized she wasn’t alone.

‘Hello? Who’s there?’ Angela called out.

‘I speak only a little English. My name is Marietta. They probably used a taser on you. They had to carry you down the stairs. You’ll be sore all over, but it will pass.’

That helped a little. At least Angela now knew why she felt the way she did. And not being alone in the dark was a huge comfort.

‘My name is Angela, and I don’t speak any Italian. What are you doing here?’ she asked.

The only response was a snuffling sound, as if the girl was crying. And then Angela realized that that was exactly what she was doing. Marietta – whoever she was – was sobbing her heart out, and for a few minutes she didn’t say another word. Then the girl seemed to pull herself together and spoke a single sentence that chilled Angela to the bone.

‘I’ve been brought here to be killed,’ she said quietly.

There really was no adequate answer to that statement and for a few seconds Angela just lay on the bed, stunned into silence. Then she spoke again.

‘You can’t be sure of that. You can-’

‘I’m very sure,’ Marietta interrupted. ‘Last night I watched them do it.’

Angela wasn’t quite certain what the girl meant. She was obviously alive so she had to be talking about someone else, unless Angela had completely misunderstood what she was saying.

‘What do you mean?’

‘There was another girl down here. Her name was Benedetta.’ Marietta’s voice was fracturing under the emotional strain she was feeling, the words indistinct.

‘Just tell me, Marietta. Take your time.’

‘There’s a ceremony. They made me wash and put on a robe. But they took Benedetta first and I watched.’ Marietta’s voice broke again, and for several minutes she sobbed uncontrollably before she regained some semblance of composure.

In a shaking voice, she hesitantly described the rest of the ceremony she’d witnessed. As she did so, Angela’s terror increased. What the other girl was describing was an almost exact match for the ritual that had been described in the scroll – the Noble Vampyr document.

Until that moment, Angela had harboured the faint and completely irrational belief that what she was experiencing was somehow unreal, an elaborate charade or something of that sort. But Marietta’s words, as she described the brutal rape and murder of another girl in that very room the previous day, completely destroyed even that tiny hope.

She shuddered when she heard Marietta’s description of the ritual rape, but it was the very last part of the ceremony, the last acts that Marietta had witnessed, which frightened her the most.

‘Please tell me that again,’ Angela asked.

‘The man who killed her, the man who bit into her neck, he was a vampire.’

Before she’d arrived in Venice, Angela would have unhesitatingly countered such a claim with a calm and reasoned statement of her own. Vampires, she would have said, do not exist and have never existed. Belief in such creatures is a pre-mediaeval legend with no basis whatsoever in reality.

She was tempted to say something like that to Marietta, but for a moment she didn’t. Because, whatever the truth or otherwise of the vampire legend, she knew beyond any doubt that the group of people who were holding them believed absolutely in the reality of the undead. For them, vampires were undeniably real.

And, though she wouldn’t even admit it to himself, the hooded man, the apparent leader of the group, bothered her more than she could say. His ability to move in complete silence, the fact that she’d never seen his face because it was kept permanently in shadow under his hood, and above all the stench of rotting flesh that clung to him all seemed so totally non-human that she was beginning to doubt her own mind. Her rational brain still rejected utterly the concept of the existence of vampires, but at that moment, in those circumstances and in that place, she was no longer certain that she was right.

But she tried to persuade the girl anyway. ‘Vampires are not real, Marietta,’ she said soothingly. ‘You must have seen something else.’

‘You didn’t see him. He had huge teeth, long and pointed, and he drank the blood from her neck.’

Angela let it go. ‘So what happened then?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. I screamed and one of the men hit me with the taser and knocked me out. When I came round, the cellar was empty and Benedetta was gone. One of the men told me they’d taken her to San Michele, so I know she was dead.’

For a few moments, Angela sat in silence, wondering if she should share what she knew about the group, about the lapsed Hungarian monk Amadeus, about Nicodema Diluca, the Venetian who had claimed descent from the Princess Eleonora Amalia von Schwarzenberg, and who both Marietta and the dead girl had unfortunately been related to. But she knew that wouldn’t help, wouldn’t help either of them, and so she held her tongue.

There was just one last question she needed to ask, though she already knew the answer: ‘But how do you know they’re going to kill you as well?’

Marietta sobbed out her reply. ‘Because they told me it’s my turn on the table tonight,’ she said.