James Becker - The Nosferatu Scroll

Belief was one thing, reality quite another.

Angela turned round in her seat and looked across the room at where Marco was sitting in a comfortable easy chair. She knew what she was reading was rubbish and then she made the mistake of telling Marco precisely what she thought.

‘I know exactly what this is,’ Angela said. ‘This book is some kind of do-it-yourself vampire kit. It’s bullshit.’

The slight smile left the Italian’s face and he stared at her in a hostile manner. ‘I’m not interested in your opinion,’ he snapped, ‘only in your skill as a translator.’

Angela tried again. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘the bones of the woman who wrote this are lying in a two-hundred-year-old tomb on the Isola di San Michele, crumbling away to dust. I think that’s a fairly compelling argument to suggest that she didn’t live for ever.’

‘How do you know she wrote it?’

The possibility that the book had actually been authored by somebody other than the occupant of the old grave hadn’t occurred to Angela. But it didn’t change anything.

‘I don’t, but it was a reasonable assumption. But whether she did or not, I know — and I hope you do too — that vampires don’t exist. They’re a myth, nothing more.’

Marco didn’t respond for a moment, then he shook his head. ‘I already told you,’ he said coldly, ‘I’m not interested in your opinion, ill informed though it obviously is. Just get on with that translation.’

He stood up and walked across to where Angela was sitting. ‘Have you found any references to the source yet?’ he asked.

Angela nodded and pointed at the last sentence she’d translated. ‘This says that she’d seen some other document, but I haven’t found any mention of when she saw it or whereabouts it was.’

Marco scanned her translation swiftly and nodded. ‘Good. Keep going. Let me know as soon as you find a mention of where the source might be hidden.’

In fact, the very next section of the Latin text seemed to provide a clue. An obscure clue, granted, but the first indication she had seen of where the other document, the mysterious ‘source’, might be concealed.

Carmelita had again referred to the ancient dead and the screaming dead, neither of which made very much sense to Angela, but the next sentence did provide what looked like a location. Once she’d translated it and rendered the words into readable English, it read: Our revered guide and master has graced us with his sacred presence, and has instructed us in the ancient procedures and rituals, these being recorded by him for all time and for all acolytes in the Scroll of Amadeus, and then secreted beside the guardian in the new place where the legions of the dead reign supreme .

She didn’t like that last expression, though it could obviously just refer to a graveyard somewhere; and the idea of a ‘guardian’ really troubled her. But, despite her unshakeable conviction that vampires were nothing more than a pre-mediaeval myth, it was the first part of that sentence that sent a chill down Angela’s back.

It suggested that Carmelita had actually met, or at least seen, the person — Amadeus? — who had authored the source document. But that made no sense. Carmelita had died in the third decade of the nineteenth century. Whoever had written the source document must have died some seven hundred years earlier. Maybe she meant that there had been a succession of ‘masters’ through the ages, each acting as the head of the ‘Vampire Society’ or whatever name had been given to the group that Carmelita had been a member of.

But that wasn’t what the Latin said. And Latin was a peculiarly precise language.

Behind the tomb on the island of San Michele, Bronson spotted a glint of metal from one side of the unconscious man’s belt. Risking a closer look, he saw a dull black shape: the lower end of the magazine for a semi-automatic pistol, tucked into a quick-release leather pouch. There was no reason why a man would carry a magazine unless he also had a pistol, which meant he must be wearing a belt holster, not a shoulder rig.

Bronson looked up again at the man with the pistol. He was taking a couple of steps closer to him — shortening the range to ensure that his next shot would be the last he would have to fire.

The unconscious man was lying face-up, which meant the weapon had to be tucked into the small of his back, otherwise Bronson would already have seen it. Jerking him over on to his side, he rammed his other hand behind the man’s back, inside the windcheater he was wearing.

His fingers closed around a familiar shape and, as the approaching man stopped and took aim, Bronson rolled sideways behind a vertical gravestone. As he moved, he racked back the slide of the automatic pistol with his left hand to chamber a round.

His movement took him just beyond the gravestone and, as he emerged from that fragile shelter, he aimed the pistol straight at the approaching figure, who swung his pistol towards him and fired two rapid shots.

Bronson flinched as a copper-jacketed nine-millimetre bullet slammed into the gravestone right beside him, but he held his aim and squeezed the trigger.

During his short career as an army officer, Bronson had become quite proficient with the Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic pistol, then the standard officer’s sidearm, but he also knew how inaccurate such weapons were at anything other than very close range. So he wasn’t surprised when his shot went wide.

But his target was clearly shocked to be under attack himself. He turned and ran, dodging around the gravestones as he fled.

Bronson rose cautiously to his feet, the pistol he’d grabbed — which he now saw actually was a nine-millimetre Browning, the weapon he’d got so used to firing in the Army — still pointing towards the fleeing figure. The second man had also taken to his heels, and was a few yards ahead of his accomplice, a bulky bag clutched in his left hand.

Bronson glanced down at the man lying on the ground. He was obviously unconscious, and no doubt would remain that way for some time. The noise of the shots had echoed around the island, and Bronson knew that people would start heading towards the area very soon, which would add to the confusion. He looked over at the tomb, at the two fleeing men, and made a decision.

What he should do was call the police, hand over the thug he’d knocked out and explain that he was one of the men who’d attacked him and Angela the previous evening. The problem was that he had absolutely no proof. And he knew only too well how the corporate police mind works: the most likely result of such actions would be that he — Bronson — would face a charge of assault or the Italian equivalent of grievous bodily harm.

No, that was never going to work. Even if by some miracle Bronson managed to avoid being arrested, it would be hours before his assailant would be in a fit state to answer questions himself. The best chance of finding Angela lay with the two men who were now about seventy yards away from him and running hard.

Bending over the unconscious man, Bronson unsnapped both the belt holster and the leather pouch containing the two spare magazines for the Browning, and put them in his pocket.

Then he sprinted after his quarry.

Angela shook her head, and moved on. A second, much shorter, sentence followed, but two of the words in it were not listed in the Latin dictionary she was using. The translated sentence read: There the open graves yawn ready where the fires burned in ages past, in the place where a little man once strutted and postured, and where a little veglia funebre once held sway .

For a few moments, she stared at what she’d written. It sounded like directions to a specific place, and she had a vague idea what at least one of the two non-Latin words might mean, because it wasn’t that different to a familiar English word. She looked at the desk in front of her, and at the other books and dictionaries stacked on it. One of them was a pocket-sized Italian-English dictionary. She picked it up, flicked through the pages until she reached the letter ‘v’, and read the entry for veglia . She didn’t need to look up funebre , because the combination of the two words was listed in that entry.