James Becker - The Nosferatu Scroll

Marco released Angela’s handcuffs, and led her out of the cabin. The boat was already moored, a bow and stern line attached, and it was easy enough to step from the side of the vessel onto the landing stage. She looked around. The boat was positioned a short distance down the channel between the small octagonal island that lay at the southern tip of Poveglia and the middle island. In the distance, looking south, she could make out buildings on the Lido.

The octagonal island looked like a flat-topped fort, the inward-sloping sides made of stone, and mooring alongside that would have been difficult. But that wasn’t their objective. A short distance along the level stone landing stage that marked the southern end of the larger island was an impressive-looking building. It reminded Angela of a typical Venetian palazzo , and must, she thought, have been part of the retirement home on the island, before being abandoned in the 1960s. The facade was covered with a web-like exoskeleton of rusting scaffolding. That, Angela knew from her research, was not part of some renovation project, but had been erected almost a quarter of a century earlier simply to stop the buildings from falling down.

She looked over to the north-east, and there, beyond the trees, rose the imposing stone bell tower, looking something like a church steeple, its tall red-tiled roof supporting a large metal crucifix at the very top. All the openings in the tower appeared to have been bricked up, possibly when the scaffolding was put in place. A chill wind blew in suddenly from the waters of the lagoon, bringing with it a swirl of mist, and from somewhere nearby Angela heard the faint sound of a bell ringing.

She glanced at Marco. ‘Did you hear that bell?’ she asked, and pointed towards the tower. ‘I thought it came from over there.’

He looked at her dismissively. ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘The bell was removed in nineteen thirteen.’

‘I know what I heard,’ Angela insisted, but her voice lacked conviction. She’d read in the guidebook that the sound of a bell was still sometimes heard on the island.

The hooded man emerged from the cabin of the boat and began moving silently — his feet never seemed to make a sound — towards the derelict building that lay closest to the tower.

Marco checked that Angela’s handcuffs were still secured, and then pushed her in the same direction, two of his men following behind.

The short procession entered the building through an opening that had obviously once been a doorway, but which now gaped open to the elements. Inside, it was a scene of almost total devastation. Rubbish and debris lay strewn across the floor. Plaster had fallen off the walls and ceiling, and in several places the floor timbers of the storey above had broken, and pointed downwards into the ground-floor room like long, blackened and jagged teeth. On many of the pieces of surviving plaster, graffiti had been scrawled. Cast-iron radiators stood forlornly against the walls, rust covering the areas where the paint had flaked off. In one corner, two windows had disappeared, and a heavy growth of vegetation had forced its way inside and was beginning the long slow process of reclaiming the building.

Angela was not of a nervous disposition, but she knew absolutely that if she had had any choice in the matter, she would have walked out, climbed back on to the boat and never, ever returned to Poveglia.

The very fabric of the building seemed to echo with the cries of the dying, and the knowledge that the thin soil on the island covered the bones of tens of thousands of plague victims weighed heavily upon her. If there was any place on the face of the earth where the dead could speak, this, this island of Poveglia, was probably it. She could so easily imagine the giant fires consuming piles of smouldering bodies, and the shallow graves tended by workers who were themselves diseased. Through it all would stalk the bizarre and otherworldly figures of the doctors, trying vainly to fight a contagion that they didn’t understand and could not cure, their only protection against the disease being the hook-nosed masks they wore, filled with peppers and spices which they believed might filter out the infective elements. These men must have looked like massive predatory birds as they tried in vain to bring some relief to the sufferers.

Suddenly, a movement caught her eye and Angela gave a little cry of alarm. A shadow played across the wall as a beam of sunlight entered the building, and she could almost swear that she saw the shape of a man wearing a beak-like mask somewhere outside the building. Then the wind blew again and the shape dissolved and reformed, as the branches of the tree shifted.

‘Come on,’ Marco ordered, tugging at Angela’s arm.

Following the hooded man, they stepped over and around the debris to the far end of the room and made their way carefully over to the bell tower.

Inside, little light penetrated because the windows and other openings had been bricked up. The tower extended above their heads, a vertical well of darkness. In the gloom, they saw the first few steps of a rusting spiral staircase which ran around the walls of the tower.

‘So where is it?’ Marco demanded.

For an instant, Angela didn’t realize that he was talking to her, then she pulled herself together.

‘The text doesn’t say,’ she replied. ‘It just seems to suggest that it’s hidden somewhere here, in this place. There’s nothing else I can tell you, and I did translate all the rest of the Latin.’

Marco looked at her for a long moment, then switched his glance to the stairs before turning to one of his men and issuing a crisp order in Italian. The man turned and strode swiftly out of the tower.

‘We need torches,’ he said. ‘I don’t think the document is hidden anywhere down here. People still come to this island — you can tell that from the graffiti they’ve scrawled on the walls — and if it had been found already, we would have known about it. So it’s probably hidden somewhere that people wouldn’t normally visit or explore.’ He looked again at Angela. ‘I hope you’re not afraid of heights,’ he said, ‘because my guess is that Carmelita, or whoever hid it, probably put it right at the top of the bell tower. You’re going up there to find it for us.’

When the man he’d sent back to the boat returned, half a dozen torches of different sizes in his hands, Marco stepped across to Angela and unlocked her handcuffs. Then he picked up the biggest torch, a squat, grey and clearly heavy instrument with a rechargeable battery, and shone a powerful beam directly upwards, tracing the course that the spiral staircase followed until it reached a level platform.

‘That can’t be the top of the tower,’ Marco said. ‘It’s not high enough. There must be another staircase above that.’

‘I don’t want to do this,’ Angela murmured. ‘I really don’t want to go up there.’

Marco shrugged. ‘You’ve got two choices. Do this and you’ll live, at least for a little while longer. Refuse, and I’ll have one of my men strangle you right now and dump your body here. It’s up to you.’

For a few seconds Angela stared at him, but she knew she had no option. She was quite certain that Marco would order her death with as little compunction as he would order a cup of coffee. She grimaced, reached down and picked up two of the smaller torches, then she strode across to the foot of the spiral staircase.

She switched on one of the torches and shone the beam at the metal treads in front of her. There was little dust or debris visible on them, and even the banister appeared to be intact and in reasonably good condition. She guessed that some of the infrequent and illegal visitors to the island probably climbed at least some distance up into the tower out of idle curiosity, if nothing else. That was good news, because it meant that the staircase should support her weight. Cautiously, she rested her left foot on the lowest tread, then began to climb.