The Nosferatu Scroll (34 page)

Then there was a click and a faint rumble, and a black oblong shape appeared at the far end of the church. Beyond
it he could see electric lights illuminating the top of a staircase that was set into the wall. It was obviously a door that led down to a cellar.

Two figures—the men he’d seen in the stable—stepped out and into the church. Bronson tensed as he prepared to run toward the hidden door and down the steps. But then he relaxed again. The men had left the cellar door wide-open, which meant that they could be going back down again. It would be better to wait until they’d left the church completely, and then make his entrance.

But then he realized there was another possibility. They could have left the door open to allow other people to enter the cellar, and this changed the odds once again.

As the two men reached the main entrance to the church, Bronson heard another noise. From over to his right, from the house itself, he heard the sound of shoes on gravel. It was clear that several people were now approaching the old church.

By now, the two men were still clearly visible at the church doorway, presumably waiting for the arrival of the approaching people. Bronson glanced over at the secret door, but knew that if he left his hiding place, he’d be seen well before he reached it. He would have to wait, and pick his moment.

There was a brief instant of silence, and then the first of the new arrivals stepped into the church. Bronson stared across at the figure, disbelief clouding his mind.

The man—and Bronson knew the figure was male simply
by the way he walked—was clad in a dark, possibly black, hooded robe, his face completely hidden. He looked like a caricature of a monk, though without any doubt Christian thoughts and prayers were a long way from his mind. Bronson had guessed from the few clues he had been able to find that the deaths of the girls might well have involved some kind of ritual. What he hadn’t anticipated was that the ritual might involve a quasi-religious ceremony. But this was what seemed to be about to take place, because the hooded man was followed by others, all clad in the same all-enveloping robes.

The figures made their way in single file across the old stone floor, the hems of their robes just brushing the ground. Bronson counted eleven, plus the first man, who appeared to be the leader of the group. He seemed to remember that thirteen was supposed to be the number of witches in a coven, and wondered if that was significant, if there was another man already waiting down in the cellar.

Then he heard a faint click, and saw that the lights on the stone staircase had been extinguished. A new light, faint and flickering, had sprung to life just inside the hidden doorway. Obviously the leader of the group had lit a candle.

As the man started to walk slowly down the staircase, Bronson heard something else: a single scream of anguish from deep within the chamber below. Could it have been Angela? One way or another, he was going to find out.

Bronson knew he was heavily outnumbered, and he
had no idea if any of the group were carrying weapons under their robes, or if there were firearms stored in the cellar. Whatever the case, he had to get down to that cellar.

And suddenly he saw a way of achieving just that. The men filing down the stairs were walking slowly, but they were too close together for him to tackle one without the person in front seeing what was happening. Each man paused inside the secret doorway to light a candle before descending out of sight, which meant several of them were now clustered outside the doorway, waiting their turn. But then the last man in the group stopped and turned back to the church entrance. One of the two men outside the ruined building had said something—Bronson didn’t catch what—and had attracted his attention.

The man walked swiftly back to the church entrance, muttered something to the men outside, and closed the door. Then he turned and walked back toward the hidden doorway, through which the last of his companions had just disappeared. At that moment Bronson holstered the Browning and made his move.

He ran across the debris-strewn stone floor after his target. The moment he did so, the hooded man turned toward him, obviously having seen some movement in his peripheral vision. When he saw Bronson, a sudden expression of panic clouded his features, and he opened his mouth to shout.

But Bronson didn’t give him the chance, as he dived
forward and slammed his left shoulder into the man’s chest. The impact drove every vestige of breath from his target’s body, and he fell backward, gasping for air.

The two men tumbled to the ground together, Bronson cushioned by the body that had fallen beneath him. The other man caught his breath and started to rise, but Bronson had anticipated his movement. He punched him—hard—in his solar plexus, and followed it up with a vicious short-arm jab to the chin. The man’s head snapped backward, the rear of his skull crunching onto one of the flagstones. His eyes rolled backward and his body went limp.

Bronson stood up and looked all around him. He knew he had only seconds to act before somebody in the group noticed that the last man hadn’t appeared.

He seized the man’s right arm and pulled him into a sitting position, then wrapped his arms around his chest and lifted him upright across his body, like a bulky sack. Moving awkwardly across the ground to the pile of debris behind which he’d hidden before, he simply let go. The man’s limp body crashed to the ground, his head again cracking onto the old stones. At best, Bronson guessed that he would have a concussion and a blinding headache for a few days. At worst, he might already be dying from cranial bleeding. Either way, he didn’t care.

With some difficulty, he removed the man’s robe. Underneath it, he was naked apart from a pair of sandals, confirmation, if it was needed, of the sort of ritual that was about to take place. Bronson didn’t bother about the
sandals, but swiftly pulled on the robe over his street clothes and then ran across to the door in the church wall.

Pulling the hood down over his features to conceal his face as much as he could, he picked up one of the large yellow candles lying on a shelf just inside the doorway, lit it from the box of matches that was also on the shelf, and began to make his way slowly down the stone spiral staircase.

The moment the light went out, Marietta gave a shriek of terror. She knew what the sudden darkness meant. For them, there was no more time. The ceremony was about to start, and within minutes she and Angela would be dying in agony.

She screamed again as the first hooded figure appeared at the base of the stone staircase, his features fitfully illuminated by the flickering light of his candle.

In almost complete silence, the remainder of the group appeared one by one at the bottom of the staircase and stepped into the cellar, the only noise the faint slapping of their leather sandals against the stone floor. As before, they moved slowly around the stone table, taking up their prearranged positions in what looked like a ghastly parody of a religious service.

Angela watched with mounting horror as the figures, all dressed in identical black robes, strode silently and menacingly across the cellar. Marietta had explained what
had happened the night Benedetta had died, and it was obvious that the ritual tonight was going to be almost identical.

For a few moments, the men stood in unmoving silence around the stone table, apparently waiting for something. A couple of them turned slightly and looked back toward the entrance to the staircase. Then everyone in the cellar clearly heard the sound of another set of footsteps descending toward them, and seconds later a twelfth hooded man stepped into the room. There was only one space in the circle of figures, and the man stepped confidently forward and took his place within it.

The leader nodded his satisfaction. The circle was complete and, once the Master made his appearance, the ceremony could begin.

Bronson stood near the foot of the stone table, his head bowed respectfully, trying his best to emulate the stance of the other men in the cellar. Like them, he held the candle in his left hand but, unlike the others, his right hand was hovering close to the vertical seam that joined the two halves of his robe together at the front.

The garment had only one small pocket, nowhere near big enough to conceal the Browning pistol, and he’d had to leave it tucked into the belt holster. With the heavy robe over the top, the weapon was fairly inaccessible, and he knew that if—or rather, when—he had to draw it, he’d have to be quick and get the robe open as fast as possible.

But his prospects were bleak. He knew that when he
pulled the weapon, he might be able to shoot down two or three of the men, but in this confined space he would soon be overpowered. He would have to wait, and choose his moment carefully.

He was aware that there were other people in the cellar besides the dozen men near him. He could hear faint movements, and the sound of sobbing, coming from somewhere in the darkness over to his left. Convinced it was Angela, he resisted the temptation to rush to her aid.

The scene Bronson was witnessing was bizarre in the extreme. Aboveground, and away from the isolated island, life in the twenty-first century continued unabated, but what he saw in front of him was medieval both in its appearance and, he was sure, in its objective. In that cellar, at that time, the modern world had simply ceased to exist, and the ritual about to take place was designed to produce a result that wasn’t even medieval in scope. It was far older, and far more evil, than that.

Suddenly he detected a change in the atmosphere. A sense of anticipation, of barely controlled excitement, filled the air.

And then he heard something: a soft, sibilant sound, coming from the stone staircase behind him. The noise could be caused only by the hem of one of the robes rubbing on the stone steps as someone else descended into the cellar. All the other hooded men who were now surrounding the stone table were wearing sandals, and he’d clearly heard their footsteps as they crossed the floor of the ruined church. Perhaps the new arrival was barefoot?

He detected a new and unpleasant odor, and then the thirteenth man entered the cellar. He moved silently to the opposite side of the stone table, his hands and face invisible in the folds of his black robe, and all the other men, including Bronson, bowed low in supplication.

For a few seconds, nothing happened; then the new arrival—the person Bronson now assumed was their leader—gestured to the man on his left, who bowed in acknowledgment and produced a small box that he raised above his head while the other men looked on with reverence. Bronson tried to keep his face in shadow as much as he could, but he knew he had to act just like one of the other acolytes in order to remain safely anonymous. So he moved the candle slightly to one side, so that its light no longer fell directly on his face, and looked up.

The man lowered the box, opened it and removed a skull, the bone dark brown and cracked with age, the lower jaw and parts of the cranium missing. There was a soft collective intake of breath at the sight of the relic.

“Behold the skull of Nicodema Diluca himself,” the man said, “the legitimate descendant of the Princess Eleonora Amalia, the relic for which we have searched for so long.”

What happened next made no sense to Bronson. He watched in fascination as the man used a pair of modern pliers to snap off a section of the cranium, and then proceeded to grind it up using a pestle and mortar, his movements slow and deliberate, almost ceremonial.

The operation took several minutes, because the man
clearly wanted to reduce the fragment of bone to dust, but eventually he appeared to be satisfied and placed the pestle to one side. He lifted the mortar above his head, and again this action seemed to inspire a kind of rapture in the group around the table, the dozen men raising their heads to stare reverently at the stone container.

Finally, the man lowered the mortar and walked slowly around the table to show the contents to the leader; then he returned to his place in the circle and put the mortar to one side, on another, very much smaller, stone table behind him.

For a few seconds, nobody moved. Then the leader made another gesture, this time to the man on his right, who nodded and pointed toward the two men who were standing on Bronson’s left. They both bowed slightly, then stepped away from the stone table and walked slowly away into the darkness that shrouded the other part of the underground room.

As they did so, a scream ripped through the oppressive silence, and Bronson could sense an almost palpable ripple of excitement coursing through the men around him. Working by feel with his right hand, through the thick material of the robe, he checked the Browning, trying to make sure that the hammer was cocked and the weapon ready to fire.

Then he heard another voice from the darkness, laced with fury and yelling in English, which he recognized immediately. Angela was somewhere in the room, together with at least one other young woman.

The leader of the group turned his head slightly to look toward the sound of her voice, as did several other men around the table. Bronson stared in that direction as well, trying to build up a picture of the layout of the room, so that when he moved, he wouldn’t slam into a wall or trip over anything. As far as he could tell, in the fitful illumination provided by the candles, it had a low ceiling and no doors apart from the one leading to the spiral staircase. Along one side of the room were short dividing walls that formed small, doorless, internal rooms. Possibly they’d once been storerooms but now, even in poor candlelight, he could see that they were being used as cells.

He could just about see Angela, who was still shouting her defiance at the men. Bronson tensed, ready for action. And then he heard a sudden sharp crack and a brief flare of light from the darkness, and she fell silent. He didn’t know for sure, but it looked as if one of the men had used a Taser on her. He would pay for that, Bronson vowed, his hands clenched, blood pounding in his temples.

The leader of the group held up his hand, and immediately the attention of all the men around the table snapped back to him. He whispered something to the man on his right, who’d been acting as his assistant during the first part of the ceremony. This man nodded and then he, too, lifted his hand.