As he’d observed earlier, the island was a reasonable size—big enough for the house to look comfortable in its setting—and as he steered the boat farther south, a small
inlet came into view. Within it, he could see a wooden jetty and beside it a launch, quite a bit larger than the powerboat Bronson had hired. The inlet wasn’t very big and as far as he could see, there wasn’t much room for any other vessels if the launch was moored there.
Then he noticed something else. Behind the house, and about midway between the property and the inlet, was an area of level ground that appeared to have been tarmacked, and on it he could just about make out something painted in white. Playing the tourist again, Bronson looked casually around him, then turned back to look once more toward the island. And now, from his slightly altered perspective, he could see exactly what was on the tarmac.
It was a large white circle, inside which was painted a letter “H”: a helicopter landing pad, which made perfect sense. Bianchi had told him that the island was owned by a senior Italian politician, so traveling to the island by boat would probably be a last resort. It would be so much more impressive, and cater to the politician’s inevitable sense of his own importance, to arrive there by helicopter.
Bronson continued ambling gently south, past the island and toward a handful of others in the same loose group, most of which had houses built on them. Again, he tried to look like a tourist as he steered the craft around and past these islands.
About two hundred yards from the politician’s island was another very small island, upon which was a simple structure that looked something like a carport—just a flat roof resting on four vertical supports with a rough wooden
table underneath it. Bronson guessed that was probably a picnic spot, the roof providing some shade from the heat of the midday sun. He looked closely at the island, trying to see if there was anyone ashore there. He glanced at his watch. It was now late afternoon in November, and the island was unlikely to be in use. Certainly, it appeared to be deserted.
Bronson spotted a narrow bay where he thought he could easily beach his craft. He took a quick look around, but there were no other boats near him, and less than ten minutes later, he was hauling on the bowline to pull the powerboat a few feet farther up the muddy beach. He turned off the outboard motor, tied the rope around the trunk of a small tree that was growing near the beach, checked he had his binoculars and the pistol—just in case—and made his way quickly across the small island until he could see his target.
He had quite a good view of the front of the house, and of the small inlet with its wooden jetty, and the launch moored against it. He lay down, resting on his elbows, and peered through the binoculars. There was no sign of life around the house so he switched his attention to the lagoon that lay beyond the island.
And then, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, he saw an approaching police launch, its distinctive color scheme making it quite unmistakable. It looked as if Bianchi had done what he had promised, and had dispatched a police patrol to check out the island. Bronson was glad that both he and his powerboat were well out of sight.
He moved the binoculars again, and looked back at the house. It was, like many of the other properties he’d seen on the outlying islands, built of a kind of gray stone, the windows fitted with wooden shutters and the roof covered in terra-cotta tiles. But as he looked at it again, he was struck by something else. All the shutters on the windows were firmly closed, and the house seemed to exude an indefinable sense of desolation, of emptiness. If he hadn’t known better—if he hadn’t seen the two men in the powerboat arrive with his own eyes—he would have assumed that it was deserted.
But then, bearing in mind the activities of the group that had snatched Angela, they would hardly be likely to advertise their presence.
The police launch was now much closer. It had slowed down, and the bow wave was about half the size it had been previously. As Bronson watched, the boat swung around the end of the island and slowed even more, finally coming to a halt beside the entrance to the inlet, where the driver of the vessel reversed the direction of the propeller in a short burst to bring the boat to a stop. He didn’t steer the boat into the inlet, which puzzled Bronson for a moment until he focused the binoculars more carefully and saw a substantial chain locked across the seaward end of the inlet, preventing the launch from entering.
Two police officers leaped nimbly onto the jetty from the cockpit of the launch and walked unhurriedly along a gravel path toward the house. At the front door they
paused and then one of them pressed the doorbell. But the door remained firmly closed and there was no sign of life whatsoever from the house. Eventually, the officers stepped back from the door and looked up at the house. Even from the distance he was watching, Bronson saw one of them give an expressive shrug of his shoulders; then they walked back to the police launch and got back on board. The driver gunned the engine, turned sharply in a sudden spray of white water and accelerated away from the island.
For a few seconds, Bronson just lay there staring through the binoculars at the departing vessel. As searches went, the most accurate description of what he’d just witnessed would be “pathetic.” The officers had made no attempt to look around the island, to try opening the main door, or even to try the other entrance to the house—there would certainly be a second and maybe even a third door into the property.
He sighed. If the Italian police weren’t prepared to search the place, he would just have to do it himself.
With a deep sense of foreboding, he stood up, took a final look toward the house on the island, and strode back to the small bay where he’d left his boat.
Angela sat at the desk and stared down at the text she was translating. In her work at the British Museum, she had quite often had to translate passages of Latin, usually sections of very old documents or inscriptions that dated back almost two millennia to the height of the Roman Empire, and she’d become familiar with the syntax and sentence construction of writings from that period.
But she’d also worked on documents that were much more recent, everything from documents produced at the height of the Byzantine Empire at the end of the first millennium through medieval texts and all the way to passages that were only a couple of hundred years old. It had always fascinated her the way that Latin, though essentially “dead” and unchanging, had been adapted by its users to the changing patterns of speech and writing over the centuries. It was sometimes possible to estimate the age of a piece of text simply from the way the Latin had been written, by the words that were used.
And what she was working on now was clearly much more ancient than the bulk of the diary that she’d seen before. The syntax suggested it was probably late medieval, dating from between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, hundreds of years before Carmelita Paganini had started keeping her journal. That suggested that Marco had been right in the date he’d ascribed to the scroll.
On one level, Angela was quite enjoying what she was doing, working out the meaning of the Latin sentences and transcribing them into clear and understandable English. But even as she worked, a growing sense of foreboding was creeping over her, a foreboding that gave way to a kind of numb resignation as she understood the full implications of the information contained in the scroll. Even the title of the text was disturbing, though not entirely a surprise:
The Noble Vampyr
.
Once she’d completed what Marco had told her to do with the genealogy, just confirming the link, the bloodline, that existed between Nicodema Diluca and the so-called Vampire Princess, she’d started working on the next page. But she hadn’t needed to translate the initial section, because within a few minutes she’d realized that it was almost exactly the same as the Latin she’d already seen in the leather-bound diary, and had presumably been copied from the same source. This part of the scroll appeared to be essentially an introduction to the topic and included the attempt to justify the ridiculous claims that the author had made and which Angela had already translated.
But the second section of the manuscript was highly specific about vampires. It explained at some length about the way vampires were supposed to live, and, according to the unidentified author, the reality was a far cry from the romantic images of suave, well-dressed vampires of the twentieth century drinking the blood of their willing victims. Clearly, none of the more contemporary writers had referred to this text or to any other ancient source documents that might have contained similar descriptions.
According to this treatise, vampires were both cannibalistic—which was hardly a surprise, given that their favorite diet was supposed to be blood drunk from the necks of nubile young girls—and scavengers. In fact, according to the translated text, the favorite hunting grounds of vampires were graveyards, where they would break into the tombs of recent burials and feast on the decaying flesh of the bodies they found there. The only inviolate rule was that the bodies of former vampires—the discarded hosts, as it were—were considered to be noble, and were never to be consumed.
The most reliable way to identify a vampire, the author of the text asserted, was by the smell of rotting meat that they invariably exuded, and which normally caused them to be shunned by mere mortals. But this, the author then explained, was a small price for the vampire to pay in exchange for the priceless gift of eternal life.
As she finished translating this particular sentence, Angela shuddered at her recollection of the hooded man
and the appalling smell that seemed to surround him like a miasma. Whoever he was, he was clearly the leader of this group of deranged men, and had presumably decided to make himself seem as much like an authentic vampire as he could. She guessed that somewhere under his black robe he was carrying a piece of decaying meat to produce the odor she had smelled.
She shook her head and returned to the translation.
The next few sentences dealt with the misguided and usually futile attempts to kill vampires, attempts that the text stated were frequently mounted by people who simply failed to appreciate the inherent nobility of the vampire. Then the only guaranteed ways by which the death of a vampire might be achieved were specified in some detail. The most effective method was for the heart of the creature to be removed from the body and buried separately—as far away from the vampire as possible.
Decapitation also worked, but driving a wooden stake through the heart was, in the opinion of the author, useless because the heart remained in place, and the heart of a vampire was so powerful that nothing short of its removal from the body would guarantee death. Similar derision was reserved for the idea of placing some object—a brick or a length of timber—in the mouth of the vampire, and the author cited two cases that he had known of personally where a body had been buried with a brick driven into the jaw, and where the vampire had risen effortlessly from the grave after biting through the offending object. Again, he failed to be specific about
where and when these alleged events were supposed to have occurred.
What bothered Angela the most about the text was the author’s matter-of-fact acceptance of the existence of vampires. From the tone of his descriptions, he could have been talking about any natural phenomenon with which he would have expected most of his readers to be familiar. It was as if, at the time the author was writing, vampires were regular and accepted members of society who simply lived very different lives from most of the people around them.
Angela found such an attitude impossible to accept, and she repeatedly checked the text for any sign that the author was being less than completely serious. But there was no indication that this was the case. Whoever had created the original text was apparently absolutely factual in what he was describing—or, at least, he appeared to believe he was being absolutely factual. He was certainly convinced of the reality of the vampire as a living and breathing—albeit undead—member of the society in which he lived.
Again, Angela wished she had some idea who the author had been, and where and in which period he’d lived. She was still certain, from the Latin syntax, that the time period was roughly medieval, but beyond that she hadn’t been able to pin it down.
She read the English translation she had prepared for a second time, then held it up to Marco, who walked over to the desk and took it from her with a nod.
Then she sighed deeply, and read the first sentence of the Latin text that formed the third part of the treatise written on the scroll: the section of the document that she now understood contained detailed instructions on how anyone who wished to do so could become a vampire himself.
Bronson cut the motor as he approached the entrance to the inlet. There was, he realized, no point in trying to sneak ashore. The island was too open to make any sort of covert approach feasible, so he allowed the boat to coast gently forward until it just nudged the end of the jetty, then stepped ashore, tying the rope around the heavy chain that barred the entrance to the inlet. As he did so, he noted that the chain itself was rusty, as was the padlock that secured it, and for the first time since he’d followed the two men, a scintilla of doubt entered his mind. It didn’t look to him as if anyone had unlocked the padlock or moved the chain for quite a long time; otherwise at least some of the rust would have flaked off.
He looked at the launch that was secured to the jetty. The water was quite clear and he could see the curve of the hull where it vanished beneath the surface. The dark paintwork was liberally covered in marine growth, which suggested that the boat had been sitting there for some
time—boats that were used regularly tended to have much cleaner hulls.
But that, of course, might also mean that the owner tended to commute by helicopter. It was an alternative explanation, but didn’t do much to quell the doubts that were now nagging at him. The island really did look deserted.