The Nosferatu Scroll cb-4

by James Becker

  Her literal translation rendered this as the island of the ‘ancient dead’ or ‘old dead’, which she really didn’t understand. It wasn’t clear to her whether Carmelita was using the expression as a synonym for San Michele, or if she meant somewhere completely different, possibly a more ancient graveyard located elsewhere in Venice.

  And there was another phrase which sent a chill through her. The pages referred to planctus mortuus, which translated as the ‘wailing dead’ or the ‘screaming dead’. ‘Dead’, as far as she was concerned, meant exactly that: death, the cessation of life. The dead could neither scream nor wail. But the same expression appeared in several places in the text, and the context suggested that Carmelita was referring to a specific place where the dead had screamed.

  Angela shook her head and continued working through the text.

  38

  When anybody asked him if he knew any of the martial arts, Bronson normally told them he had a black belt in origami — it amused him to see the conflicting emotions this statement usually produced. In fact, he’d trained to an intermediate level in aikido.

  Perhaps the most unusual, and certainly the least known, of the oriental fighting techniques, aikido is purely defensive. No master of aikido could attack anyone using the art, because no offensive moves exist. But once an aikido practitioner is attacked, his or her response to that attack can easily prove fatal to the assailant. It relies heavily on unbalancing the opponent, essentially using the attacker’s own weight and speed and aggression against him.

  Bronson’s tutor, a Japanese man barely five feet five inches tall and aged sixty-three, had told him years before that an aikido master could take on as many as three masters in any of the other martial arts, at the same time, and still expect to be standing when the dust settled.

  Bronson frankly hadn’t believed him, but one evening when the two of them had left the dojo and were walking over to where Bronson had parked his car, a gang of six scarf-wearing football supporters, high on drink or drugs, had streamed out of an alleyway directly in front of them, looking for trouble, and ideally searching for a soft target.

  Bronson had stepped forward to face them, but with a courteous bow the old Japanese man had motioned him back, taken two paces forward and just stood waiting. His harmless appearance and placid stance had seemed to enrage the youths, and they’d spent ten seconds shouting abuse before launching themselves at him.

  What happened then had had all the appearance to Bronson of magic. It was as if each youth encountered something akin to a catapult: the faster they slammed into the old man, the faster they were tossed aside. In a little under twenty seconds the six youths were lying broken and bleeding on the ground, and throughout the entire time the old man barely seemed to have moved, and when he stepped over the legs of the nearest youth to rejoin Bronson, he hadn’t even been breathing hard.

  ‘Now do you believe me, Mr Bronson?’ he had asked, and all Bronson had been able to do was nod.

  And now that training was going to save his life. Bronson swayed backwards, and the blackjack whistled viciously through the air a bare inch in front of his face. Then he stepped towards his attacker, turning as he did so, and seized the man’s right arm. He pulled him forward so that he was off balance, and continued to turn his body so that his back was towards his assailant. Then he bent forward, still pulling on the man’s right arm, and his attacker flew over his back to land — hard — on the ground directly in front of him.

  Bronson hadn’t practised Aikido for some time but, much like riding a bike, his brain still retained the moves and his body responded with the actions he’d practised so many times in the past. The throw he’d just completed was one of the first and most basic of the moves he’d learned, and he finished it off in exactly the way he’d been taught, by tugging on the man’s arm at the instant before he landed, dislocating his shoulder.

  The man screamed in pain as the bone was wrenched from its socket, the blackjack tumbling from his hand on to the ground. He was hurt, but Bronson knew he wasn’t immobilized, not yet, and this was something he needed to attend to. He snatched up the blackjack, and swung it as hard as he could against the man’s skull. His attacker flinched and raised his left arm in a futile defence, but there was no way he could avoid the blow. The impact jarred Bronson’s arm, but had the desired effect on his target. The man slumped backwards, instantly knocked unconscious.

  Bronson was certain he’d recognized his assailant — and this meant that the two men by the tomb, only some twenty yards away, were surely part of the same gang.

  Standing up, he turned towards the tomb of the twin angels and took a couple of steps forward. Then he dropped down, because one of the men had just swung round to face him, and was brandishing a semi-automatic pistol in his hand.

  The sound of the shot was shockingly loud amid the tranquillity of the ancient cemetery, echoing off the walls of the church and the tombs all around him. The bullet just missed Bronson as he dived for cover, smashing into a tall stone cross behind him and sending stone chips flying in all directions.

  The pistol added a whole new dimension to the situation. Bronson would have had no qualms about tackling the two men. As he’d just demonstrated, he was proficient in unarmed combat, and his whole body burned with fury against the men who’d snatched Angela. Taking on two Italian thugs and beating them to a pulp might well have helped him find her, but no level of anger or competence in hand-to-hand combat would help against a man carrying a gun. This radically altered the dynamics of the situation.

  For perhaps a second, he remained crouched down behind another of the tombs, weighing his options and figuring the angles. He couldn’t run, not even if he’d dodged and weaved from side to side, because nobody can out run a bullet. And he couldn’t hide, either, because the other men knew where he was.

  He had exactly one chance, and it all depended on the unconscious man lying on the ground a few feet behind him. Keeping as low as he could, he scuttled over to the unmoving figure, and crouched down beside him. He pulled open the man’s jacket, searching desperately for a shoulder holster and a weapon he could use to save his life. But there was nothing, no sign of a pistol under either arm.

  Bronson looked over to the tomb of the twin angels. The two men seemed to have separated: one had ducked back behind the tomb, and was keeping low, but Bronson couldn’t see the second man, the one who’d fired the pistol.

  Then another shot cracked out, the bullet again missing Bronson, but only barely. The second man had moved around to the east, to get a better shot at him, and was standing only about fifteen yards away in the classic target-shooting stance: feet apart, the pistol held in his right hand, and his left hand supporting his right wrist.

  The next shot, Bronson knew, would probably be the last thing he would know in this world, because from that range the man couldn’t possibly miss him.

  39

  Almost despite herself, Angela was finding the task she’d been given quite fascinating. The dictionary was very comprehensive, and she had no difficulty in rendering the Latin expressions and sentences into modern English, albeit sometimes lengthy and rather convoluted modern English.

  She knew that the grave on the Isola di San Michele dated from the early nineteenth century, and she still believed that the diary had been written by the woman who was buried there, and that the book had been interred with her by her family as a mark of respect. Indeed, the sections of the diary that she’d already translated back in the hotel room showed the unmistakable cadences of the kind of Latin she would expect to have been written by a well-educated person — male or female — of that period.

  But the section at the back of the book, the text she was now being forced to translate, was very different. Although Angela was fairly sure that it had been written by the same person who had authored the diary sections — the handwriting was quite distinctive — apart from the first few sentences, which seemed to act as a kind of introduction, the remainder o
f the text shared none of the characteristics of the earlier pages.

  The more she read and worked on, the more sure she was that this Latin had been copied from a much older source, which would confirm what Marco had told her — most of it was a copy of a far more ancient document, interspersed with comments and additional material presumably supplied by Carmelita. Some of the language was mediaeval, she thought, maybe even older than that. She could find no explanation anywhere in the text to suggest what exactly the source book had been, but there was something faintly familiar to her about some of the phrases and expressions the unknown author had used, and Angela began to wonder if what she was looking at was a passage taken from a mediaeval grimoire. That might actually tie up with Marco’s apparent belief that the source document dated from the twelfth century.

  Whatever the source, the Latin text made for grim but fascinating reading. The passage began with a long paragraph, almost messianic in its fervour, which baldly asserted that vampires were a reality, and that they had existed since the dawn of time. These creatures were older than the rocks and the stones that formed the continents. They had, the text claimed, been known to all the great writers of antiquity; and it even listed the names of a handful of ancient Greek philosophers who had explicitly mentioned them.

  Angela had snorted under her breath when she translated that particular section. She was reasonably familiar with the works of two of the philosophers named in the book, and couldn’t recall either of them ever mentioning anything quite as bizarre as vampires. And, she noticed, the author of the text had conspicuously failed to mention where these explicit references might be found, which was a sure sign that the references were simply a product of the writer’s imagination.

  Having established, to the author’s satisfaction at least, that vampires existed, the text continued with the unsurprising claim that these creatures were not human in the usual sense of the word. They looked human, the writer stated, and were extremely difficult to identify, but they were actually superhuman because of their immortality, great physical beauty, and the enormous depth of knowledge gleaned over the ages that they had walked the earth.

  Angela could see that, if this belief had become accepted by the general population in the days when it had been written, almost any reasonably attractive and well-educated man or woman could have been suspected of being a vampire. And, at the height of the various anti-vampire crazes that had swept Europe at intervals during the late Middle Ages, it was likely that many people would have suffered the consequences.

  In the final section of what Angela was mentally calling ‘the introduction’, the writer set out the ultimate purpose of the treatise. In the following paragraphs, it was stated, fully detailed instructions would be provided so that mere mortals, if seized with a true and honest wish and desire to achieve a state of sublime perfection, might be elevated to a higher plane and actually join the legions of the undead.

  She’d been right: what she was translating was a do-it-yourself vampire kit. Angela finished the introduction, read the Latin text and her English translation once more, then placed the page on one side of the desk.

  Marco, who’d been sitting in a chair a few feet away from Angela while she worked on the text, stood up and walked over to the desk. He picked up the English translation she’d prepared, and nodded to her to continue working.

  The next section of the text provided a stark reminder of the life of Carmelita Paganini, and of what she had tried to achieve. One sentence in particular served as a hideous confirmation of her apparent attempts to join the ranks of the undead, and even offered other people the opportunity of trying to join her. It also served as a further confirmation of Marco’s contention that there was, indeed, an older source document that Carmelita must have seen.

  This sentence read: I now know the truth of the deeper realities that have governed the actions and conduct of my ancestors, and of the gift of eternal life that only the most dedicated adepts can enjoy, and I have had sight of the rules governing the conduct of those sacred rituals and measures which will enable seekers after this most exquisite of gifts to benefit to the fullest possible extent, to achieve immortality through the mingling of new blood with sacred relics, to become a sister of the night, a member of the holy brotherhood and sisterhood of blood, as I have done.

  Angela read the sentence again a couple of times, changed a few of the phrases to make it read better, and then put the page aside. The meaning seemed absolutely clear to her. Clear, but senseless. The woman who’d kept the journal and written those words had believed that she’d found the secret of eternal life, by becoming a vampire. Granted, the actual word ‘vampire’ didn’t appear in the sentence, but the last few phrases seemed to be clear enough. Carmelita Paganini had believed she was going to live for ever, by feasting on a diet of blood and sacred relics — whatever they were.

  There were only two problems with her belief, as far as Angela could see. First, vampires don’t exist. They are a myth, a pre-mediaeval legend, with no basis in reality whatsoever. Second, Angela had found the woman’s diary in a grave on the Isola di San Michele, lying underneath what was left of a wooden coffin, which contained the bones of the woman herself, the presumed author of the book, and she’d looked pretty dead to her.

  Belief was one thing, reality quite another.

  Angela turned round in her seat and looked across the room at where Marco was sitting in a comfortable easy chair. She knew what she was reading was rubbish and then she made the mistake of telling Marco precisely what she thought.

  ‘I know exactly what this is,’ Angela said. ‘This book is some kind of do-it-yourself vampire kit. It’s bullshit.’

  The slight smile left the Italian’s face and he stared at her in a hostile manner. ‘I’m not interested in your opinion,’ he snapped, ‘only in your skill as a translator.’

  Angela tried again. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘the bones of the woman who wrote this are lying in a two-hundred-year-old tomb on the Isola di San Michele, crumbling away to dust. I think that’s a fairly compelling argument to suggest that she didn’t live for ever.’

  ‘How do you know she wrote it?’

  The possibility that the book had actually been authored by somebody other than the occupant of the old grave hadn’t occurred to Angela. But it didn’t change anything.

  ‘I don’t, but it was a reasonable assumption. But whether she did or not, I know — and I hope you do too — that vampires don’t exist. They’re a myth, nothing more.’

  Marco didn’t respond for a moment, then he shook his head. ‘I already told you,’ he said coldly, ‘I’m not interested in your opinion, ill informed though it obviously is. Just get on with that translation.’

  He stood up and walked across to where Angela was sitting. ‘Have you found any references to the source yet?’ he asked.

  Angela nodded and pointed at the last sentence she’d translated. ‘This says that she’d seen some other document, but I haven’t found any mention of when she saw it or whereabouts it was.’

  Marco scanned her translation swiftly and nodded. ‘Good. Keep going. Let me know as soon as you find a mention of where the source might be hidden.’

  In fact, the very next section of the Latin text seemed to provide a clue. An obscure clue, granted, but the first indication she had seen of where the other document, the mysterious ‘source’, might be concealed.

  Carmelita had again referred to the ancient dead and the screaming dead, neither of which made very much sense to Angela, but the next sentence did provide what looked like a location. Once she’d translated it and rendered the words into readable English, it read: Our revered guide and master has graced us with his sacred presence, and has instructed us in the ancient procedures and rituals, these being recorded by him for all time and for all acolytes in the Scroll of Amadeus, and then secreted beside the guardian in the new place where the legions of the dead reign supreme.

  She didn’t like that last expressi
on, though it could obviously just refer to a graveyard somewhere; and the idea of a ‘guardian’ really troubled her. But, despite her unshakeable conviction that vampires were nothing more than a pre-mediaeval myth, it was the first part of that sentence that sent a chill down Angela’s back.

  It suggested that Carmelita had actually met, or at least seen, the person — Amadeus? — who had authored the source document. But that made no sense. Carmelita had died in the third decade of the nineteenth century. Whoever had written the source document must have died some seven hundred years earlier. Maybe she meant that there had been a succession of ‘masters’ through the ages, each acting as the head of the ‘Vampire Society’ or whatever name had been given to the group that Carmelita had been a member of.

  But that wasn’t what the Latin said. And Latin was a peculiarly precise language.

  40

  Behind the tomb on the island of San Michele, Bronson spotted a glint of metal from one side of the unconscious man’s belt. Risking a closer look, he saw a dull black shape: the lower end of the magazine for a semi-automatic pistol, tucked into a quick-release leather pouch. There was no reason why a man would carry a magazine unless he also had a pistol, which meant he must be wearing a belt holster, not a shoulder rig.

  Bronson looked up again at the man with the pistol. He was taking a couple of steps closer to him — shortening the range to ensure that his next shot would be the last he would have to fire.