The Nosferatu Scroll

by James Becker

  The climb seemed endless, but eventually she stepped on to a platform that she guessed was virtually at the top of the main part of the tower, and looked around. Again, there was graffiti on the walls, which meant that other people had made the same climb fairly recently. There was no obvious hiding place at that level.

  Marco appeared beside her within seconds. ‘I told you the bell had been removed,’ he said, pointing at a substantial beam that ran from one wall of the tower to the opposite side, and which had clearly been designed to support some heavy object.

  ‘I did hear something,’ Angela insisted.

  She looked at the walls of the bell chamber, and at the bricked-up openings in the side walls, and shivered.

  ‘I suppose this was where he jumped from?’ she said quietly.

  ‘Who?’ Marco asked.

  ‘The mad doctor. If the story about him in that book was true, I mean.’

  ‘Nobody knows, and I don’t care.’ Marco looked all around them, quickly reaching the same conclusion as Angela. ‘There’s nothing here,’ he said. ‘We need to get to the very top.’

  Another short flight of stairs brought them to a second level, above the old bell chamber. And the stairs stopped there. Attached to one wall was a steel ladder, around which metal hoops had been bolted to prevent anyone climbing it from falling off. Like the spiral staircase, the metal looked old and rusty, and none too safe.

  ‘Keep going,’ Marco ordered again.

  Angela swallowed hard. Heights didn’t particularly bother her, but she had a horror of falling, and even the metal hoops around the ladder weren’t much of a safe-guard against that happening. But she knew she had no option. She tucked both the torches into the waistband of her trousers, because she’d definitely need both hands free to make the climb, then reached up and began the ascent.

  It wasn’t a long climb, perhaps twenty steps in all, and at the top she was faced with a wooden trapdoor set into the underside of a narrow platform. There was no bolt or catch, and the trapdoor swung open fairly easily as she pushed up on it. As it swung back against the wall with a dull thud, she took out one of the torches and shone the beam into the void above. Apart from an old broom, it appeared to be completely empty.

  She reached up and placed both torches on the floor of the small platform, then heaved herself through the hole and stood up.

  Angela could see that Marco was just beginning to make the same climb, and for a fleeting instant she debated dropping some heavy object down on to the top of his head, but then dismissed the thought. Even if she succeeded in hitting him, she would still have to contend with the men waiting on the ground floor down below, and if Marco didn’t reappear, she guessed that she wouldn’t leave the tower alive.

  The platform was about eight feet long and three feet wide, and the walls appeared to be just as solid and featureless as those on the two platforms below her. As far she could see, there was nowhere here where anything of any size could be concealed.

  Marco pulled himself through the trapdoor and stood next to her. ‘What now?’ he demanded. ‘Where is it?’

  Angela shook her head in despair. ‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘I can only tell you what I translated from the Latin text. That didn’t give any indication of where the document might be hidden, apart from mentioning this tower, and even that was far from explicit.’ She looked around at the featureless walls of the platform. ‘If it was ever here, maybe somebody found it and removed it, years ago.’

  ‘I’ve already told you: if it had been found, we would know about it. It must be here somewhere.’

  ‘But there’s no possible hiding place here.’

  Then a thought struck her and she walked back to the trapdoor and peered down the square-sided shaft up which they had both climbed. She turned back to Marco.

  ‘How high do you think we’ve climbed?’ she asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the walls are square,’ she replied. ‘At the top of this tower is a tall steeple. If we’d climbed to the very top of the tower, the walls would meet at a point above our heads. There must still be a space somewhere above us.’

  Marco glanced down through the trapdoor, then looked around and nodded. ‘So where’s the access?’ he asked.

  The ceiling of the space they were standing in was only about seven feet above their heads. Angela didn’t reply, but simply picked up the broom and began gently tapping its handle against the ceiling. It didn’t take long to cover the small space, and in one corner this technique generated a hollow-sounding thud.

  ‘Here,’ she said, and shone the torch beam at the ceiling. Almost invisible in the grubby whitewash that covered the ceiling was the outline of an oblong shape. If they hadn’t been looking for it, there was no way they would ever have seen it. At one end of it was a small hole, inside which a few strands of frayed material could be seen poking out.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I think it’s the end of a length of rope, probably used to pull the trapdoor closed from here. And then they cut the rest off to hide the fact there was an opening in the ceiling. Just hold this,’ Angela snapped, the spirit of the quest taking over, despite the circumstances. She passed the torch to Marco, who looked surprised, but did as she had told him and aimed the beam where she indicated.

  She pressed her hands firmly against one end of the oblong mark and pushed upwards. There was a creaking and tearing sound, the noise of old dry wood moving against a solid object, and the section of ceiling lifted a fraction of an inch. She changed position, and pushed again, but the panel wouldn’t budge.

  ‘You hold the torch and I’ll lift it,’ Marco told her.

  Angela took a few paces backwards and aimed the beam of her torch at the ceiling. Marco raised his arms and shoved against the wood. Nothing happened, so he stepped back a few inches and tried again, his face contorted from the effort. With a final snapping sound, the panel suddenly gave way and flew upwards.

  A cloud of dust and small pieces of wood cascaded down over his head. Angela looked on in horror as a skeletal arm, held together within a carapace of leathery skin, swung down, the bony hand seeming almost to grab for Marco. Above his head, framed in the dark opening, she found herself staring into the sightless eye sockets of a partially fleshed human skull.

  51

  Bronson steered the powerboat out of the end of the Grand Canal and swung the bow around to the south. Directly in front of him, on the opposite side of the Canale della Giudecca, lay the long and narrow, almost banana-shaped, island of Giudecca, with the much smaller triangular island of San Giorgio Maggiore to the left.

  If he was right, and the men were heading for the southern part of the lagoon, a good place to wait for them to pass would be near the end of Giudecca. He stopped his turn and aimed for the Canale della Grazia which separated the two islands in front of him. Once he’d motored through the gap, he steered the boat over to the right, stopping alongside the southern coast of the island just below Campiello Campalto.

  Like almost everywhere else in Venice, the island of Giudecca was bordered not by a wall but by a level walkway perched only two or three feet above the surface of the virtually tide-less Adriatic. The edge of the walkway was interrupted by sets of shallow steps to allow people to disembark from boats, and by substantial lengths of timber driven vertically down into the seabed to act as mooring posts. A line of old-fashioned metal streetlamps marked the seaward side of the walkway, and on the opposite side of it were the front walls and doors of the houses and shops.

  Several powerboats and launches were already secured alongside the walkway, but Bronson had no trouble finding a vacant mooring post. He looped the bow line of the boat around it and secured it with a quick-release knot, so that he would be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. He shut down the outboard motor to conserve fuel, and checked to see how much he had left. It looked like about half a tank, which he hoped would be enough.

  Then he pulled his binoculars out of his
jacket pocket and climbed up on to the walkway using the nearest set of steps. He sat down, dangling his legs over the edge of the walkway. He could have begun his surveillance of the water traffic around the island from his boat, but the boat was bouncing and rolling in the waves that continuously washed against the shore of the island, and in the wake of every passing vessel; focusing on anything through the binoculars would have proved difficult. It made much better sense to use his binoculars from the stable platform that the walkway offered.

  He had carried out numerous surveillance operations in his short career as an Army officer, and later in the police force, but in those tasks he had been part of a large team, both static and mobile, and the target had usually been a particular individual to be followed and watched. If he’d been covering a building, it had generally been a single dwelling with only one or two entrances, and one team would be assigned to cover each. The emphasis had always been on team operations – a large number of people blanketing a small target – never would one man cover even a single location with any degree of success.

  But out here, in the choppy waters of the Venetian lagoon, Bronson was going to try to do exactly this. He intended to look at every boat heading south that passed on either side of his position. If he’d been right in his guess, and his attackers had originally intended to sail around the eastern end of Venice, and they’d left the canal system on the north side of the city after their confrontation with him, then they would have to pass fairly close to him now to reach the same area. But he was also keenly aware that if the blue powerboat had managed to reach the Grand Canal before him, his attackers could already be well beyond his reach.

  He started by checking all the small boats he could see out in the lagoon, and which were already a good distance away from him.

  As he’d expected, there was a huge number of boats and launches in a variety of shapes and sizes and types and colours. Blue seemed to be quite popular, and twice he saw vessels that looked remarkably like the one he was searching for, but in both cases he was able to reject the sightings. One of the boats had three people in it and the other one at least four, possibly five, and he was fairly certain that the men he was chasing wouldn’t have stopped to pick up passengers. What’s more, these two boats were a long way to the south of where he was sitting, and whatever route the two men had taken, he doubted if they could possibly have got that far ahead of him.

  Although he was concentrating on checking the vessels at the far end of the lagoon, Bronson was also watching those passing much closer to him. He knew that if he was to stand any chance at all of spotting the boat, he would have to establish a pattern for his surveillance, and not get fixated on watching just a single part of the lagoon. In fact, he knew he ought to use the binoculars as sparingly as possible, because it would be a fairly unusual thing for someone to be doing on the island, and he definitely didn’t want to draw attention to himself. If this was going to work, he had to look pretty much like any of the other people going about their business on Giudecca.

  So Bronson relied largely on his eyes, and quickly worked out a kind of pattern search that he thought would give him the best chance of spotting the boat and its occupants before they saw him. The most likely area for them to enter the southern half of the lagoon was, he believed, over to the east, so he concentrated most of his attention there. He looked that way for about thirty seconds, then looked down to the south of the lagoon for fifteen seconds, and finished his one-minute scan by looking over to the west, then back to the east again. It was boring and repetitive, but Bronson didn’t care. It offered the best chance he was going to get to find Angela, and for that he could endure almost anything.

  So he sat on the walkway, beside his powerboat, and watched, and kept watching, never letting his concentration flag for an instant, as the hull of his vessel rose and fell gently beneath him. Fifteen minutes passed. Then twenty, and then twenty-five. After half an hour, Bronson began to feel desperate. Either his guess about the destination of the two men was completely wrong or they had slipped past him somehow. Or maybe they’d just been much faster than he’d expected. In any case, he’d blown it.

  Bronson sat there, following the pattern search that he was now convinced was a waste of time, and wondering what the hell he could do next. He toyed with the idea of simply getting back into the boat and motoring around the islands scattered about the lagoon in the hope that he might catch a glimpse of the blue powerboat that way. But even as he considered this course of action, he realized it would be a complete waste of time. There were over one hundred islands out there, and almost every one would have a powerboat secured to its jetty, and there was a fair chance that quite a lot of them would be blue.

  He picked up the binoculars to check out another flash of blue he’d spotted some way down to the south, then muttered in irritation. That particular boat was blue and white, a completely different colour scheme. He lowered the binoculars again and for a few seconds just sat staring vacantly across the glistening blue waters of the Laguna Veneta, trying to work out his next move.

  And then, almost without him being aware of it, he found himself looking directly at the blue boat with the two men on board. It had just emerged from around the east end of the main island of Venice, as part of a group of perhaps half a dozen other small boats and one larger launch, all of whose courses then began to diverge as they headed for their individual destinations.

  Bronson didn’t react in any way at all. He just sat on the walkway, looking back towards Venice while his eyes, invisible behind his mirrored shades under the peak of his baseball cap, remained locked on the vessel. The men in the boat appeared to be looking around casually as they headed south, but gave no sign that they were in any way suspicious of the man wearing sunglasses sitting by himself on the south-east side of the island of Giudecca.

  Bronson waited until the boat was a couple of hundred yards distant. Then he climbed casually down the steps into his craft and started the outboard engine, which immediately rumbled into life. He released the bow line, and swung the boat around to follow the other vessel, keeping his speed well down, to ensure that he wouldn’t get close enough to attract attention.

  Then, as if linked by an invisible tether, the two powerboats, now almost three hundred yards apart, headed south across the Laguna Veneta, away from the city and towards the scatter of outlying islands.

  52

  Angela couldn’t help it. She squealed in fright and stepped backwards, away from the horrendous apparition that had just appeared. But in seconds she’d recovered her composure. She was no stranger to old bones, and ancient corpses interested, rather than frightened, her. It was just the shock, and the unexpected appearance of the old body.

  Marco had jumped back with a yell of fear, lashing out with his torch at the dangling corpse.

  For a few seconds, neither of them moved, the beams of their torches shining across the open space towards the trapdoor, and illuminating the grisly body that had partially fallen through it.

  ‘I didn’t expect that,’ Marco said, brushing dust from his clothes.

  ‘Nor did I.’

  Angela moved forward and shone her torch upwards. The skeleton – or what she could see of it – appeared to be largely articulated, skin and desiccated muscle still clinging to the bones. It looked old.

  ‘There’s a story,’ Marco said, ‘that the mad doctor from the lunatic asylum didn’t jump from the tower, but was actually walled up here. Could that be him?’

  Angela shook her head. ‘I don’t think so, because that was a hundred years later. The Latin text referred to a “guardian” for the source document. I think this body was placed up here to act as a kind of warning to anyone who wanted to get into the space above us. I think this is what Carmelita meant.’

  ‘You mean this corpse was once a member of her group?’

  ‘Not necessarily. From what I’ve read, finding a dead body on this island wouldn’t be difficult. I think they just dug on
e up and positioned the corpse above the trapdoor before they closed it.’

  It took a moment for the implication to hit them both.

  ‘A plague victim?’ Marco asked, his voice hushed as realization dawned.

  ‘It’s possible,’ Angela said. ‘We both know this island is covered in plague pits. But that doesn’t mean that the corpse is still infectious. I’m not a doctor. I don’t know how long the bacteria can survive once the host is dead.’

  ‘But it could still be carrying the disease?’

  Angela shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. But these days there are treatments available for the plague,’ she added reassuringly.

  She was silent for a moment before she voiced the logical conclusion. ‘If I’m right – and the corpse was positioned there as a form of protection for the source document – my guess is that the people responsible probably thought the body was infected. That’s why Carmelita referred to a “guardian”.’

  ‘So you think the document might be up there?’ Marco asked, pointing upwards.

  ‘That would seem likely, and I really hope so.’

  ‘Well, we’ll soon find out. Or you will, to be exact.’

  There was an old broom, almost all the bristles long vanished, standing in one corner of the space. Marco picked it up, placed the head under the skull of the corpse and pushed upwards. The skeleton vanished from sight, the dangling arm disappearing as quickly as it had materialized.

  Angela shone her torch through the trapdoor. In the void above her, it was surprisingly light, the daylight spearing in through gaps between the tiles, and she could clearly see the pointed shape of the top of the tower.