The Nosferatu Scroll

73

But right then wasn’t the correct moment. When the bullets started flying, Bronson wanted the innocent parties – the girl standing a dozen feet from him and awaiting her fate and, of course, Angela – to be as far away from the firing line as possible. It looked to him as if the ceremony would require the girl to be tied down on the table, and that would probably be as safe a place as anywhere in the cellar. So his best option was to wait until she was immobilized, because then she wouldn’t panic and run into a stray bullet. And she would also be the focus of everybody in the room. That might give him time to step back to a suitable vantage point and cover the dozen men with his pistol. Quite how the scenario would pan out after that, Bronson didn’t know. He would just have to think on his feet, and play the cards he’d been dealt.

He switched his attention to the four men who now surrounded the dark-haired girl. The two who had dragged her from the cell by the wall were still holding her bare upper arms, keeping her in position. Bronson couldn’t see what the other two men were supposed to be doing. Then he found out.

Simultaneously, they both reached out, seized the material of her white robe and pulled violently on it. The Velcro seams ripped apart, the robe separating into two halves, front and back, which the men casually tossed aside before stepping backwards a couple of paces.

The girl emitted an even louder squeal of terror as her nakedness was revealed to all, and redoubled her struggles to get free. But it was an unequal contest, and the two men had no difficulty in keeping her still. They looked towards the leader of the group, and when he beckoned them, they strode forward, forcing the naked girl towards the end of the table almost directly in front of Bronson.

They turned her round so that her buttocks were resting against the old stone, then simply pushed her off her feet. The two men who’d removed her robe stepped forward and seized her legs, lifting her up and placing her writhing body flat on the table. In moments, the men had buckled the leather straps around her wrists and ankles, while another man tied a strap around her head as well.

He knew that it was time to stop this, before anything else could happen to the girl.

The men who’d been lashing the girl’s body to the table stepped back and resumed their places in the circle, and waited expectantly. Bronson knew without a shadow of doubt what the next act in these bizarrely mediaeval and simply monstrous proceedings was going to be. Somebody, one of the men around the table, was going to climb up on to the table, force himself on to the girl’s body and rape her. And he knew absolutely that he wasn’t going to stand by and let that happen.

Surreptitiously, he took a couple of steps backwards, moving slightly out of the circle, and took a firm hold of the Velcro seam of his robe, preparing to act.

Then the leader of the group spoke again to his assistant, and Bronson caught the faint sound of his voice, though not the words he spoke. The voice was weak and rasping, as if he hadn’t used it for a long time or was simply unused to talking. The assistant nodded, then looked up and extended his hand, pointing directly at Bronson. And suddenly, every man in the room was looking at him.

As he stared across the table at the figures opposite, Bronson could just make out the glint of the leader’s eyes under the hood, and below that the shine of his teeth, a faint horizontal bar of white in the gloom. But there was something else, something that sent a chill through Bronson’s soul and literally raised the hairs on the back of his neck. It looked as if the canine teeth in the man’s upper jaw were at least twice as long as they should have been, the ends sharply pointed.

But before he could react to the sight, the leader’s assistant spoke directly to him.

‘You go first,’ he murmured. ‘Give her something to scream about.’