James Becker - The Nosferatu Scroll

He watched carefully as the two men emerged from behind the temporary screen carrying the body on a stretcher, and then saw a police officer step forward and unzip the body bag. The dead girl’s tumble of blonde hair filled the screen as Bronson had used the camera’s zoom lens to focus on her face. For the briefest of instants he saw her forehead, her open left eye — at the moment of death, the eyes don’t close serenely the way they do in the movies, but remain open and staring — the side of her face, her cheek and part of her neck.

Something struck him about what he was seeing, and he wound the movie sequence back to the point just before the police officer unzipped the body bag. Then he ran it forward in slow motion. This helped clarify what he was seeing, but he still couldn’t be certain. So he ran it again, this time advancing the video film frame by frame.

Three of the frames offered him the clearest possible view of the dead girl’s face, and he examined each of them carefully, enlarging one particular section to study it more closely.

The girl’s skin was marred, almost freckled, by dark marks, which Bronson guessed were either dried blood or earth from where her body had been dumped; the skin itself was mottled with the first signs of decomposition. But there were several marks that he didn’t understand, but which filled him with unease.

Bronson closed down the video and searched the hard drive until he found the pictures that he’d taken with Angela’s camera of their discovery of the three dead bodies in the cemetery and the subsequent events.

The first image he opened was the shot he’d taken through the hole in the slab over the grave. It was, by any standards, an extremely gruesome picture. The image showed the stone sides of the grave, the ancient coffin lying on the floor of the tomb, and the naked and decaying bodies of three young women dumped on top of it. Unsurprisingly, given the circumstance in which the picture had been taken, it was a little out of focus, and the flare of the automatic flash meant that some parts of the scene were so brightly lit that little or no detail was visible. But the upper corpse, the girl who’d been put in the grave last, was reasonably clear. Bronson enlarged the part of the picture that showed her head and neck, and studied it closely for some minutes. Then he sat back in his chair and shook his head. What he was seeing just didn’t make any sense.

In both the images he enlarged, he’d found what looked like the same type of injury: on the sides of the girls’ necks puncture marks stood out. He frowned. When any animal — a dog, a cat or a human being — bites, both the upper and lower jaws are involved. If it’s small enough, the object being bitten will have marks on both sides.

The twin puncture wounds used by Hollywood directors to portray the bite of a vampire are impossible to make unless the vampire’s mouth is capable of entirely encircling the neck of the victim, something that is at best extremely unlikely. In fact, any creature with jaws the approximate size and shape of the human mouth, whether equipped with oversized canine teeth or not, would leave bite marks on the side of a human neck completely unlike the neat twin puncture wounds of the classic vampire mythology.

The most likely shape of such a wound would probably be two semicircular marks made by the jaws, probably with deeper wounds where the longest teeth would have sunk into the flesh. And if the bite was delivered powerfully enough, quite probably the skin and flesh might be bitten through to leave an almost circular wound. And that, Bronson realized, was exactly what he was staring at in these photographs.

It looked to Bronson as if the people who were collecting vampire relics were far from the bunch of harmless nutters that he and Angela had assumed. Whoever they were, they’d clearly moved a long way beyond just collecting old books and ancient bones.

The girls in the cemetery might have been enthusiastic members of the group, for whom it had all gone badly wrong. But Bronson doubted it. He thought it was far more likely that they were innocent victims on whom the vampirists — for want of a better description — had been feasting.

The very idea was manifestly ridiculous, but Bronson couldn’t doubt the evidence of his own eyes. And what he’d seen on those images lent a still greater urgency to his search for Angela, because he now had no doubt that she was in the clutches of a group of people who had killed at least four women already, and would presumably have no qualms about increasing that tally.

Getting washed when the only equipment to hand was a bucket of lukewarm water and a small bar of soap was difficult enough. Doing so standing up in front of a stranger — a man — who was staring at her body with unconcealed lust was one of the most unpleasant experiences of Marietta Perini’s short life.

She began by trying her best to conceal her private parts from his gaze, but quickly realized that this was impossible. Eventually she just ignored him, never looked in his direction, and pretended that she was alone. When she’d finished and dried herself, the guard nodded his approval.

‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Now put on the robe. Don’t bother with any underwear. You’re not going to need it.’

Shaking with fear, Marietta pulled the robe on over her head, then her captor snapped the handcuff back around her wrist, securing her to the wall of the cellar once again. Then he walked out of the room to the adjoining cell, and repeated the operation with Benedetta, who initially refused point-blank to take off a single item of clothing. But her resistance ended moments later when the crackle of the taser told its own story. When she’d recovered she washed and put on the white robe, but Marietta could hear her sobbing in terror and fury as she did so.

As soon as Benedetta had finished dressing, the guard turned to leave the cellar. But before he could walk across to the foot of the stone spiral staircase, another sound intruded into the relative silence of the cellar. Somebody, or something, was coming down the steps, but the noise sounded more like a kind of slithering than footsteps.

Marietta stared across the flagstone floor, trying to see who it was. Then she noticed that the guard seemed incredibly uncomfortable, almost scared. He’d moved back until he was almost standing against the wall opposite and he, too, was staring fixedly towards the entrance to the cellar.

Then a figure entered the chamber. Clad in an all-enveloping black robe, the hood pulled forward to obscure his face, hands invisible in the long sleeves, the new arrival moved a few feet forward and stopped.

Marietta was immediately conscious of a sharp and unpleasant odour, and then a feeling, a sudden and completely irrational feeling, of abject terror. Never before had she felt that she was standing in the presence of such unremitting and undiluted evil. And she knew that, whoever it was, he was staring straight at her. She could feel his eyes, still invisible under the hood, roaming up and down her body.

The figure turned towards the guard and asked a question, his voice soft and sibilant, the words inaudible to the two girls. The guard took a couple of hesitant steps forward, pointed at Marietta and then spoke.

‘That is the Perini girl, Master,’ he said; ‘the other one is Constanta. She has the strongest bloodline. Both are linked to Diluca.’

The figure looked back towards the two girls, and appeared to nod, although the large hood made it impossible to see a definite movement of his head. Then he glided — that was the word that sprang unbidden into Marietta’s brain — across the floor and into Benedetta’s cell. There was a sudden high-pitched scream, followed by the sound of terrified sobbing.