The Nosferatu Scroll (30 page)

He took out the Browning semiautomatic, removed the magazine and checked it, then replaced it in the pistol, pulled back the slide to chamber a round and cock the hammer, and set the safety catch. Then he walked slowly along the gravel path that led from the jetty and past the helicopter landing pad to the house, looking all around him all the time as he did so.

He didn’t ring the bell, just pressed his ear to the wooden front door and listened. There was absolutely no sound from inside the property. With the pistol held ready in his right hand, he walked all the way around the house, checking each window as he went, and listening at both of the other doors. Finally he accepted the sickening truth: he’d gotten the wrong island.

He couldn’t understand it. This was definitely the place where he’d seen the two men in the blue boat disappear, although the restricted size of the inlet and the state of the chain that barred it suggested that the boat couldn’t have been tied up at the jetty.

At that moment, his mobile phone rang. It was an Italian number, and when he pressed the key to answer it, he wasn’t entirely surprised to hear the cool and indifferent voice of Inspector Bianchi in his ear.

“I did as you requested, Signor Bronson,” he said. “I sent a launch to the island where you think your wife is being held, and the officers found absolutely nothing. There was nobody on the island, and the house is shuttered and barred. All you’ve achieved is to waste valuable police time, which is an offense in Italy just as, I believe, it is an offense in Britain.”

“I’m sorry,” Bronson said. There really wasn’t anything else he could say. “I was certain that you would find her there.”

“Well, we didn’t, and I suggest that now you stop interfering and leave the business of investigating this crime to the professionals.”

And with this, the phone went dead. Bronson looked at it for a moment, then slipped it back into his pocket. The one thing he wasn’t going to do was stop looking for Angela.

He replayed the sequence of events in his mind. He visualized the pursuit across the lagoon, and his decision to watch from the smaller island. He’d seen the blue boat slow down and then disappear from view. Then he remembered something else: there had been several other craft in the area, buzzing around the islands. Perhaps the men he’d been following, who’d clearly been checking around them as they approached the island—he remembered seeing them do this—had simply stopped the boat beside the chained-off inlet and waited there for a few minutes until the other tourist boats had cleared the area. And then they would have continued
their journey, careful not to let anybody see their final destination.

Bronson groaned as the realization struck home. If these men were part of the gang responsible for the deaths of half a dozen young women in Venice, their caution was merited. The only encouraging fact was that there were so few islands any farther south: their hideaway had to be somewhere nearby.

All he had to do now was find it.

Angela had thought that the second section of the Latin treatise was bizarre enough, but the contents of the third and final part of the text were shockingly brutal.

It began simply enough with a declaration that it was possible for anyone who so wished to join the ranks of the “favored immortals,” as it described vampires. But, the author cautioned, the process was lengthy and required the utmost dedication and commitment. As she translated the next few lines, Angela realized that dedication and commitment were only a part of it. The aspiring vampire also had to be prepared to become a genealogist, a grave robber and, finally and most shockingly of all, a rapist and murderer.

First, she read, it was essential to identify one of the most important of the vampire families. That concept seemed bizarre enough on its own. It suggested that vampires could breed just like normal people, and sparked a whole new line of thought for Angela. Would it be enough,
she wondered, if just one parent was a vampire? Would that be sufficient to convey immortality and unpleasant dietary requirements on the children? Or did it have to be both parents? She shook her head. She’d become so immersed in this ridiculous piece of medieval fantasy that she wasn’t thinking straight.

The reason for identifying a vampire family was then explained. Vampires, the author went on, had the ability to discard the body they were inhabiting and take over another one when the first body became infirm or so well-known that continuing to live the lifestyle of a vampire became impossible.

When she’d translated that, she sat in thought for another minute or two. What could it mean exactly? And then it dawned on her. This was the crux of the matter. This was the explanation—both the reason and the justification. This was how people who believed in the reality of vampires were able to reconcile the claim of immortality with the fact that alleged vampires did actually grow old and die. It wasn’t that they died, in the usual sense of the word. Rather, the author was suggesting, their essential life force was able to move from one body to another, and they simply discarded their previous bodies when it was convenient for them to do so.

Quite how you reconciled the completely different personality of the new host for the vampire’s spirit with that of the previous person, Angela didn’t quite understand, though perhaps the explanation was a lot simpler than that. Maybe people just looked for similarities in
behavior or appearance or anything else, and made the assumption that the vampire’s spirit now inhabited a new host. And, as proving a negative is always virtually impossible, any protestations of innocence made by the new alleged vampire would be dismissed.

The important thing, the author then explained, was that once a human body had been inhabited by the immortal spirit of a vampire, a part of the vampire’s essence would be retained in the flesh and bones, and especially in the skull.

There were two reasons for identifying the family of a vampire, he went on. The first was so that the corpse of a former vampire could be located and part of the skeleton, ideally the skull, obtained for the ritual. That was the first mention of any ritual or ceremony, but Angela was quite sure it wouldn’t be the last.

So the first thing the aspiring vampire had to do was find a tomb belonging to a person who had been a vampire, break into it and remove the head. That was distasteful enough, but it was only the beginning.

A section of the skull then had to be removed and ground up into a powder, as finely as possible, so that the essence of the vampire’s spirit could be released from the bone. But this operation would be carried out only once the other essential component of the formula had been identified and obtained.

This was the other reason for identifying the vampire family, because in order for the essence of the vampire’s spirit to be released from the bone and then recaptured,
the ground-up skull had to be mixed with the fresh blood of a female descendant of that same family.

The author digressed slightly at this point to explain, using quasi-scientific reasoning, how the female line retained the spirit of the vampire more strongly than the male line. The explanation frankly made no sense—like almost everything else Angela had translated—but it seemed to involve a woman’s periods, when she
voided her excess of blood to summon a noble vampyr and signify her willingness to be taken
. The blood of a female child was of no use,
for the essence is not yet sufficient strong in her
, and nor was the blood of a woman past childbearing age, or even that of a woman who had given birth.
She should bleed but be without child
, as the author succinctly put it.

The unknown author then moved on to the details of the ritual itself. First, a section of the skull was to be
ground exceeding fine
and placed in a suitable container. Only then was the girl introduced to the proceedings. Her body was to be washed thoroughly and she was to be immobilized in a
position convenient for all
. At least two people had to take part in the next phase of the ritual, for one would have to rape the girl,
to ensure her blood would flow sufficient free
, while the other person would bite into her neck to open the veins and allow the bleeding to start.

The text recommended allowing the blood to flow until
the heart could pump no more
—which would obviously mean that the girl would die as part of the
ceremony—
for her sublime ecstasy in surrendering her soul and spirit
would help guarantee the success of the proceedings.

The blood was to be collected in a suitable receptacle and mixed with the powdered bone of the skull, and the mixture then drunk by the participants. The author cautioned that it might be necessary to repeat the process several times before success would finally be achieved.

At this point, Angela put down her pencil and sat for a few moments just staring at the Latin text. The document, ludicrous though its suggestions undeniably were, was essentially a recipe and, to a certain extent, a justification for repeated rape and murder, enshrouded in a quasi-religious ritual.

Then she started translating the final section dealing with the ritual, and found herself totally engrossed in the text. There was, the author asserted, a further refinement that was essential if success was to be achieved. As well as the ground-up bones of a long-dead vampire and the fresh blood of one of the creature’s lineal descendants, the mixture also required the addition of blood taken from another woman, from someone who had never had any connection with any of the vampire families, but who otherwise met the same criteria. This infusion of blood, the author said, would give added strength to the mixture, and was to be extracted from the subject in the same way, by multiple rapes and severing the blood vessels in the neck.

When Angela read that, she closed her eyes and shook
her head, wondering how she could subtly alter the translation to avoid the inevitable conclusion from being drawn.

But as she reached for her pencil, she realized that Marco was standing directly behind her, and had already read exactly what she’d written.

“I knew that we’d find a more entertaining way to kill you than just a bullet,” he said. “You’ll be able to take your turn on the table tonight.”

Bronson tucked the Browning pistol into the waistband of his trousers and stared out across the still waters of the Venetian lagoon. Afternoon was steadily turning into evening, and the gray light of early dusk was deepening the aquamarine of the waters around the island.

There were two islands directly in front of him, both about the same size as the one he was standing on, and both inhabited. He could see lights shining through the windows of the small properties that had been erected on them. They looked homey, welcoming, and were also quite close together. That juxtaposition argued against either of them being the location of any kind of illegal activity, simply because anything that happened on one of the islands would be clearly visible to the people who lived on the other. The only way that either could be the place he was looking for was if the residents on both were involved in some kind of joint conspiracy. And that was a stretch.

Bronson scanned the islands through the binoculars, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Then he looked over to the left, where another small island was visible in the fading light. As far as he could see, there were no buildings of any sort on that one. It was a similar story when he searched the lagoon farther to the west: just a couple of small islets without any sign of habitation. So where, exactly, had the two men vanished to earlier that afternoon?

He lowered the binoculars and stared out across the lagoon, despair clutching at his heart. He’d been so convinced that he’d found where Angela was being held, so sure that he’d be able to rescue her. But the cold hard reality was that he was no further forward than he’d been the previous day. All he could think of doing was climbing back into his boat and carrying out a visual search of all the islands in the vicinity, and just hoping that he spotted the blue powerboat—the right blue powerboat.

He was about to reach down to release the bowline when a tiny gleam of light attracted his attention. It was coming from the area between, and obviously behind, the two inhabited islands he’d already looked at. At first, it looked as if the light might actually be on the mainland, but when he brought the binoculars up to his eyes he could see that there was another island in the lagoon, quite some distance to the south, which he’d never noticed. He’d been so fixated on the island owned by the Italian politician that he hadn’t thought to check any farther south.

He studied it carefully through the binoculars, and noticed right away that it was reasonably isolated. The only thing anywhere near it was a tiny patch of reeds and scrubby vegetation about a hundred yards away from its western shore. Bronson wasn’t even sure that he’d find any solid ground there, but it was absolutely the only possible vantage point from which he could see what was happening on the island.

There was another gray stone house there, and some kind of outbuilding nearby. The light he’d seen was coming from a downstairs window, and was a mere sliver escaping through the gap between two shutters. Other than that, he could see no sign of life.

Bronson took a final look at both the island, where the thin vertical line of light still marked the position of the house, and the tiny clump of reeds, fixing their relative positions in his mind. Then he unhitched the rope, climbed down into his boat, started the engine and moved slowly away. At least the gathering darkness might help conceal him from anyone who might be watching from the island.

He steered the boat well out to the west, then turned the bow so that it pointed directly toward the reeds, closed the throttle still further and approached at little more than walking pace. He kept as low as he could in the vessel, knowing that the silhouette of a man sitting in a boat was very distinctive, and that by lying almost flat, his craft would hopefully just look like another shadow on the water in the gloom.