James Becker - The Nosferatu Scroll

‘And if I refuse? If I simply tell you and your revolting friends to go to hell, what then?’

The guard shrugged. ‘That’s your choice,’ he said, ‘but if you don’t do what we want, you’ll taste the taser again. And if you still don’t cooperate, I’ll ask a couple of the men to come down here and have a bit of fun with you before the ceremony. They’ll enjoy it, but I don’t suppose you will. It’s up to you, really.’

Marietta held herself together until the man had walked out of the cellar, then she dissolved into tears.

Bronson sprinted across the graveyard after the fleeing men. He paused for a few seconds beside the tomb of the twin angels, staring at it with a sense of deja vu. The stone side of the grave had been smashed open — a hammer and chisel were lying on the ground beside the shattered stone — and what was left of the ancient coffin was scattered about. The grave itself was obviously very old, and most of the wood had long since disintegrated to reveal the skeletal remains of the tomb’s occupant. This corpse had also been decapitated, but this time the head was nowhere in sight. Could that explain what was in the bag that one of the men had been carrying?

Bronson shook his head and set off in pursuit of the two men. He wasn’t concerned about them getting too far ahead of him, because they must have used a boat to get to the island. From the direction they were running, this boat was moored in the inlet at the northern end of the island, where Bronson’s own vessel was tied up.

The last thing he wanted to do was storm on to the jetty and start a firefight. He needed the two men to make their getaway, so that he could go after them.

Instead of following right behind the two men, he angled over to one side and did his best to increase speed, though having to dodge around gravestones and tree trunks hampered his progress somewhat. The sound of a powerboat engine starting close to him — just a few yards away — indicated that he must be right by the jetty. He stopped and made his way cautiously in the direction from which the sound had come.

In a couple of seconds he reached the edge of the jetty, but remained out of sight as he surveyed the scene in front of him. A blue powerboat was already about ten yards out from the water’s edge, and gathering speed. The man who’d shot at him was sitting in the bow staring back towards the island, his pistol held low in his right hand, clearly waiting for Bronson to show himself, while the other man concentrated on getting the boat away from the jetty as quickly as possible.

Bronson memorized what the men were wearing and the colour and type of the boat, and waited until they turned right out of the inlet, and the craft was lost to view. Then he stepped on to the jetty, ran down to where his own boat was moored, released the line and climbed aboard, starting the engine as he sat down on the padded seat. He opened the throttle and the boat surged forwards. He pulled it round in a tight circle and headed for the entrance to the inlet, then swung the wheel to the right, to follow the other craft.

As he emerged into the open waters of the Venetian lagoon, he looked ahead. The blue boat was already perhaps a hundred yards in front of him, heading more or less east. But, as he turned in the same direction, the man in the bow pointed urgently back towards him. The other man glanced behind as well, and immediately turned the boat to the right.

Bronson knew he’d been spotted, and cursed. Wherever the two men had been heading, they were obviously not going that way any longer. They had turned south-west, towards Venice, and Bronson guessed their intentions. If they’d stayed out in the open waters, he’d have been able to follow them even at a distance. No doubt they were now heading into the city so that they could try to lose him in the notorious maze of Venice’s canals and waterways.

Angela looked up at Marco. He seemed strangely subdued by her mention of the island.

‘What is it about Poveglia?’ she asked.

He stared at her for a moment, then shook his head. ‘You really don’t know?’ he replied. ‘Your ignorance staggers me.’

He reached forward, plucked a book out of the pile on the desk and slammed it down in front of her. ‘It’s all in here,’ he snapped. ‘Read it and educate yourself.’

Pulling a mobile phone from his pocket, Marco stalked across to the other side of the drawing-room and held a brief conversation with someone. It sounded as if he was issuing orders.

Angela glanced after him, then down at the book. It looked like a fairly typical multi-language tourist guide to Venice, but the title promised that it would reveal the hidden stories of the Venetian lagoon: ‘the Venice that tourists never see’, as the author claimed. The introduction pointed out that the city hosted around three million tourists every year, although most of them never got beyond Venice itself and the islands of Murano and Burano. There was a short chapter that dealt only with Poveglia, and by the time she’d finished reading it, Angela knew exactly why Carmelita had talked about the ‘ancient dead’ and the ‘screaming dead’.

The dead on Poveglia greatly outnumbered the living in Venice. The island was covered in plague pits, a legacy of one of the most terrible periods in Venetian history. In the outbreak of 1576 alone, it was estimated that fifty thousand people had died from bubonic plague. Fifty thousand was only about ten thousand less than the total population of the old city today. And there had been at least twenty-two attacks of the plague before that one. According to some calculations, the bones of over one hundred and sixty thousand people lay in shallow graves on Poveglia.

The island had been used as a lazaretto , a quarantine station, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in an attempt to prevent the spread of infectious diseases to Venice. The city was a maritime republic, almost entirely dependent upon trade for its survival, and visiting traders who wished to step ashore in Venice would first be required to undergo a lengthy period of isolation. In fact, it was the Venetians who invented the concept of quarantine, the word deriving from the Italian quaranta giorni , or ‘forty days’.

But even this procedure clearly hadn’t protected the city from the ravages of the Black Death, as the sheer number of deaths throughout that period bore witness. The city authorities had been ruthless in their attempts to keep Venice clear of the plague. Anyone displaying the slightest signs of infection would be shipped out immediately to Poveglia or one of the other lazarettos in the lagoon. One island was actually named after this function: Lazzaretto Nuovo.

According to the author of the book, it was popularly believed that weak but still-living victims of the plague were either tossed on the burning funeral pyres or thrown into the plague pits amongst the decomposing bodies, and then buried alive. Angela thought that the expression ‘screaming dead’ barely even hinted at the horrific events that must have taken place on Poveglia some half a millennium earlier.

And the horrors apparently hadn’t stopped there. Much later, in the early twentieth century, a mental hospital had been built on the island. Some of the inmates had reportedly been subjected to inhuman tortures, mutilated and then butchered by a notoriously sadistic doctor. This man had apparently then gone mad himself, and had climbed to the top of the old bell tower and jumped to his death.

It was no wonder that the island was hardly ever mentioned in the guidebooks, and was almost never visited. In fact, the book stated that Poveglia was officially off-limits to everyone, locals and visitors. Angela couldn’t think of a single reason why anyone could possibly want to go there. And that, of course, meant that it would provide an excellent hiding place for the ancient document Marco was seeking.