by James Becker
26
Marietta jumped as the dull rumble echoed through the cellar: she knew what that noise meant. She moved to the edge of the bed and sat there, waiting. This time it sounded as though more than one person was descending the stone spiral staircase.
‘What is it?’ Benedetta sounded terrified, and Marietta didn’t feel much better.
‘It’s the door at the top of the stairs. Someone’s coming,’ she replied, not taking her eyes off the opening that marked the base of the staircase.
The sound of footsteps drew closer, and then two men stepped into view. Marietta could have wept with relief as she saw the guard approaching her carrying a towel and a metal bucket, the contents of which steamed slightly.
The guard went straight over to where Marietta sat, and placed the bucket on the floor in front of her.
‘Wash yourself,’ he instructed curtly, then turned and left.
The other man, who had presumably delivered a bucket and towel to Benedetta, followed him from the room.
‘What do we do now?’ Benedetta asked, her voice trembling with fear.
‘We do what they tell us,’ Marietta said.
Ten minutes later, the guards returned, carrying two bundles of white material, one of which they tossed onto Marietta’s bed, the other one on to Benedetta’s. One of the men removed a key from his pocket and the taser from another, and then stepped forward.
‘Give me your left hand,’ he said. ‘I’m going to release your handcuff so you can get changed. If you try anything, you’ll taste the taser again. Do you understand?’
Marietta nodded. ‘Get changed into what?’ she asked. ‘What for?’
‘You’re to put on that white robe I’ve given you, ready for the ceremony. Take off all your other clothes. All of them – your underwear as well. And then wash your whole body again. You have to be clean.’
Releasing her handcuff, he stepped back. ‘Now get on with it,’ he snapped. ‘We haven’t got much time. The ceremony must begin on time.’
27
Bronson was no further forward. He was unfamiliar with Latin, and had spent most of that time reading through Angela’s translations of the pages of the diary, looking for something – anything – that might give him a clue about what had happened to her. He looked at the computer screen, his gaze unfocused, as he mentally relived the events of the previous two days, and the macabre mystery that they had become embroiled in. The desecrated tomb; the vampire’s diary; the dead girl in the cemetery; the three corpses jammed into the grave; the burglary of their hotel room, and, finally, the attack on Bronson himself and Angela’s abduction. Running through the sequence of events, two things immediately stood out.
First, the desecrated tomb and the vampire’s diary were clearly important, very important, to somebody in Venice. The only reason, he was convinced, that he’d been attacked was so that the group of men could grab the diary, and they’d needed to get him out of the way first. But what he still didn’t understand was why they had taken Angela as well.
Then he remembered his conversation with the carabinieri officer in the cemetery on San Michele. He’d mentioned to the Italian that Angela worked for the British Museum and, actually, that might provide some kind of a motive. Because of the burglary at the hotel, Bronson was fairly sure somebody in the Italian police force had leaked the information about where they were staying. Maybe her kidnappers had also learned that she was an archaeologist, and believed she could help them translate the text in the diary.
It was a stretch to reach that conclusion, but why else would anyone want to kidnap an English woman who spoke almost no Italian? Bronson immediately felt better, because it suggested an alternative to the only other reason why Angela had been kidnapped: that she’d been grabbed by a serial killer who was operating in Venice. And that was a possibility he simply wasn’t prepared to face.
The second factor that seemed obvious to him now was that the Isola di San Michele, the Venetian Island of the Dead, was inextricably linked with what had been going on in the city.
This set Bronson thinking about the four dead girls whose bodies had been found in the cemetery, and he decided to take a look at the pictures he’d taken out on the island, to see if there were any visible clues on the corpses. As he transferred the images from his camera on to the laptop – Angela had already downloaded all the still images and video films from her digital camera on to the hard drive – he acknowledged the possibility that he’d been trying to avoid ever since the attack, that the girls had been killed by the same people who were accumulating the vampire relics.
Setting his misgivings aside, Bronson concentrated on the images that were now appearing on the screen of the laptop. When he’d taken the video film of the police recovering the body of the first girl on the island, he’d been trying to use the camera as inconspicuously as possible. The inevitable result was that the video was jerky and frequently didn’t actually show the scene he’d been trying to capture.
He watched carefully as the two men emerged from behind the temporary screen carrying the body on a stretcher, and then saw a police officer step forward and unzip the body bag. The dead girl’s tumble of blonde hair filled the screen as Bronson had used the camera’s zoom lens to focus on her face. For the briefest of instants he saw her forehead, her open left eye – at the moment of death, the eyes don’t close serenely the way they do in the movies, but remain open and staring – the side of her face, her cheek and part of her neck.
Something struck him about what he was seeing, and he wound the movie sequence back to the point just before the police officer unzipped the body bag. Then he ran it forward in slow motion. This helped clarify what he was seeing, but he still couldn’t be certain. So he ran it again, this time advancing the video film frame by frame.
Three of the frames offered him the clearest possible view of the dead girl’s face, and he examined each of them carefully, enlarging one particular section to study it more closely.
The girl’s skin was marred, almost freckled, by dark marks, which Bronson guessed were either dried blood or earth from where her body had been dumped; the skin itself was mottled with the first signs of decomposition. But there were several marks that he didn’t understand, but which filled him with unease.
Bronson closed down the video and searched the hard drive until he found the pictures that he’d taken with Angela’s camera of their discovery of the three dead bodies in the cemetery and the subsequent events.
The first image he opened was the shot he’d taken through the hole in the slab over the grave. It was, by any standards, an extremely gruesome picture. The image showed the stone sides of the grave, the ancient coffin lying on the floor of the tomb, and the naked and decaying bodies of three young women dumped on top of it. Unsurprisingly, given the circumstance in which the picture had been taken, it was a little out of focus, and the flare of the automatic flash meant that some parts of the scene were so brightly lit that little or no detail was visible. But the upper corpse, the girl who’d been put in the grave last, was reasonably clear. Bronson enlarged the part of the picture that showed her head and neck, and studied it closely for some minutes. Then he sat back in his chair and shook his head. What he was seeing just didn’t make any sense.
In both the images he enlarged, he’d found what looked like the same type of injury: on the sides of the girls’ necks puncture marks stood out. He frowned. When any animal – a dog, a cat or a human being – bites, both the upper and lower jaws are involved. If it’s small enough, the object being bitten will have marks on both sides.
The twin puncture wounds used by Hollywood directors to portray the bite of a vampire are impossible to make unless the vampire’s mouth is capable of entirely encircling the neck of the victim, something that is at best extremely unlikely. In fact, any creature with jaws the approximate size and shape of the human mouth, whether equipped with oversized canine teeth or not, would leave bite marks on the side of a human neck c
ompletely unlike the neat twin puncture wounds of the classic vampire mythology.
The most likely shape of such a wound would probably be two semicircular marks made by the jaws, probably with deeper wounds where the longest teeth would have sunk into the flesh. And if the bite was delivered powerfully enough, quite probably the skin and flesh might be bitten through to leave an almost circular wound. And that, Bronson realized, was exactly what he was staring at in these photographs.
It looked to Bronson as if the people who were collecting vampire relics were far from the bunch of harmless nutters that he and Angela had assumed. Whoever they were, they’d clearly moved a long way beyond just collecting old books and ancient bones.
The girls in the cemetery might have been enthusiastic members of the group, for whom it had all gone badly wrong. But Bronson doubted it. He thought it was far more likely that they were innocent victims on whom the vampirists – for want of a better description – had been feasting.
The very idea was manifestly ridiculous, but Bronson couldn’t doubt the evidence of his own eyes. And what he’d seen on those images lent a still greater urgency to his search for Angela, because he now had no doubt that she was in the clutches of a group of people who had killed at least four women already, and would presumably have no qualms about increasing that tally.
28
Getting washed when the only equipment to hand was a bucket of lukewarm water and a small bar of soap was difficult enough. Doing so standing up in front of a stranger – a man – who was staring at her body with unconcealed lust was one of the most unpleasant experiences of Marietta Perini’s short life.
She began by trying her best to conceal her private parts from his gaze, but quickly realized that this was impossible. Eventually she just ignored him, never looked in his direction, and pretended that she was alone. When she’d finished and dried herself, the guard nodded his approval.
‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Now put on the robe. Don’t bother with any underwear. You’re not going to need it.’
Shaking with fear, Marietta pulled the robe on over her head, then her captor snapped the handcuff back around her wrist, securing her to the wall of the cellar once again. Then he walked out of the room to the adjoining cell, and repeated the operation with Benedetta, who initially refused point-blank to take off a single item of clothing. But her resistance ended moments later when the crackle of the taser told its own story. When she’d recovered she washed and put on the white robe, but Marietta could hear her sobbing in terror and fury as she did so.
As soon as Benedetta had finished dressing, the guard turned to leave the cellar. But before he could walk across to the foot of the stone spiral staircase, another sound intruded into the relative silence of the cellar. Somebody, or something, was coming down the steps, but the noise sounded more like a kind of slithering than footsteps.
Marietta stared across the flagstone floor, trying to see who it was. Then she noticed that the guard seemed incredibly uncomfortable, almost scared. He’d moved back until he was almost standing against the wall opposite and he, too, was staring fixedly towards the entrance to the cellar.
Then a figure entered the chamber. Clad in an all-enveloping black robe, the hood pulled forward to obscure his face, hands invisible in the long sleeves, the new arrival moved a few feet forward and stopped.
Marietta was immediately conscious of a sharp and unpleasant odour, and then a feeling, a sudden and completely irrational feeling, of abject terror. Never before had she felt that she was standing in the presence of such unremitting and undiluted evil. And she knew that, whoever it was, he was staring straight at her. She could feel his eyes, still invisible under the hood, roaming up and down her body.
The figure turned towards the guard and asked a question, his voice soft and sibilant, the words inaudible to the two girls. The guard took a couple of hesitant steps forward, pointed at Marietta and then spoke.
‘That is the Perini girl, Master,’ he said; ‘the other one is Constanta. She has the strongest bloodline. Both are linked to Diluca.’
The figure looked back towards the two girls, and appeared to nod, although the large hood made it impossible to see a definite movement of his head. Then he glided – that was the word that sprang unbidden into Marietta’s brain – across the floor and into Benedetta’s cell. There was a sudden high-pitched scream, followed by the sound of terrified sobbing.
A few moments later, the figure reappeared, and Marietta caught a glimpse of his left hand as he moved past the open entrance to her cell. It was only fleeting, but just enough for her to see he had unusually long fingernails and white skin, mottled with age spots.
The figure pointed back to Benedetta’s cell, and said something in his soft voice. The guard nodded, but didn’t move until the hooded figure had crossed to the cellar doorway and vanished.
Marietta was the first to find her voice. ‘Who was that?’ she demanded.
‘It’s probably better that you don’t know,’ the guard said. ‘It’s better that no one knows.’
‘Are you OK?’ Marietta asked, as soon as he’d gone. ‘What did that man do to you?’
For a few moments Benedetta didn’t respond. Then she spoke again, her voice tremulous with fear and loathing.
‘He just touched me, that was all. He ran his fingers down my cheek, but his hand was like ice, freezing cold, and his breath – his whole body – simply reeked.’
‘I smelt something too,’ Marietta said, shuddering at the recollection, ‘but I didn’t know what it was.’
‘He smelt like rotting flesh, as if he had gangrene or some hideous disease. It was all I could do not to throw up when he got close to me. And before that, the guard stared at me the whole time I was getting washed. I’ve never been so terrified in my entire life.’
‘That’s all he did, though? He didn’t do anything else to you, did he?’
‘No. But I have a horrible feeling that all that’s about to change. I think he’s been told not to go near us, in case he sullies us. We’ve been saved for some kind of special event, haven’t we? And it’s going to happen tonight. Why else would we be told to wash and dress in this stupid outfit? Oh, God, Marietta. I don’t want to frighten you, but somehow I don’t think we’re going to see tomorrow.’
29
Angela came to slowly. Her head was throbbing, and when she tried to move her hands she couldn’t. Unaccountably, they remained by her side, as if she was held by some kind of restraint. There was something tied around her thighs as well, and she could feel a pad or bandage wrapped round her head and covering her eyes.
She could sense people around her, could hear figures moving and talking in a language she didn’t understand. For a few moments she assumed she must have had some kind of accident and was in hospital. That would explain the noises, certainly, but she had no recollection of how she’d got there.
What had happened to her? She remembered being in the hotel, remembered leaving the building and walking down the streets with Chris at her side. Then her memories became more confused. There had been a man, and a door suddenly opening right in front of them. And then something else had happened but she couldn’t clearly remember what. There had been other figures, men crowding around her, a dark room or maybe a passageway, then nothing.
Where was Chris? And where was she, come to that? Angela suddenly went cold as the realization finally dawned on her. She wasn’t in any hospital. She was somewhere far, far worse.
The murmur of voices around her ebbed and flowed. The only thing she was sure about was that they were speaking Italian. She recognized the musical cadences of the language, if nothing else.
Then she felt hands doing something to the bandage that was wrapped around her head; and moments later the pad was lifted away from her face and she opened her eyes.
High above her was a white ceiling, decorated with elaborate cornices and mouldings, and with a large electric chandelier providing brilliant illumination. It wa
s the kind of ceiling you might expect to find in the drawing-room of an English country house. But the one thing she was certain of was that she was a long way from England.
She seemed to be lying flat on her back on a wide sofa, her wrists tied with lengths of cord; and cord was wrapped around her upper thighs, too: a simple and effective way of immobilizing her. Standing in a rough circle around the sofa were about half a dozen well-dressed men, all looking at her and talking quietly together. Their expressions were neither hostile nor threatening: they simply looked down, regarding her as though she was a strange life-form they’d not previously encountered, which Angela found far more disturbing than blatant aggression would have been.
‘Who are you?’ Angela asked, her voice cracking with tension.
But the men just continued to look at her, with no hint of understanding in their faces.
Angela tried again. ‘Where am I?’
‘You’re on an island in the Venetian lagoon,’ a new voice replied in accented English, and the circle of men parted to admit another figure.
He was, like the other men in the room, smartly dressed in a dark suit. He looked as if he was about forty years old, with the dark hair and complexion that characterized many Italians. His features were regular, unmemorable, almost pleasant, but his eyes were cold and dispassionate as he approached her.
She looked up at him, fixing her attention on the man simply because he appeared to be the only one in the room who understood – or at least the only one who spoke – English.
‘What island?’ she asked.
‘Its name isn’t important. It’s a private island in a secluded part – a very secluded part – of the Laguna Veneta.’
‘What do you want with me?’
‘Your help, at least to begin with.’
‘What kind of help?’ she asked.
‘Professional, of course. You and your husband removed a book that was not your property.’ He held up the fragile leather-bound diary Angela had taken from the old tomb on the Isola di San Marco.
