The Nosferatu Scroll

by James Becker

  ‘I know, but all we need to do is keep her quiet until we get into the lagoon. Then she can scream and wriggle about all she wants to, because it won’t make any difference.’

  At that moment, the powerboat swung left into the Grand Canal and heeled over as the driver opened the throttle and increased speed.

  4

  Venice is a stunning and amazing place, Bronson thought, but it also has a lot of problems.

  Possibly the most beautiful city in the world, it is spread over a total of one hundred and seventeen islands set in a shallow lagoon, and its population of around sixty thousand live in a maze of streets so confusing that even natives of the city can still get lost in them. And, although it possesses some of the most outstanding architectural jewels in Italy, arguably in the world, the vast majority are slowly and inexorably sinking into the mud of the lagoon as their wooden foundations yield to the enormous weight of masonry pressing down on them. Many buildings have been abandoned; many others will suffer the same fate without very extensive – and very expensive – renovation and recovery work.

  It is perhaps therefore not surprising that hotels in Venice are a long way from being the cheapest in the world.

  Angela had made the booking over the Internet, and had managed to find a small hotel tucked away in the Cannaregio district, to the north of central Venice, which wasn’t charging anything like the rates demanded by some of the more central establishments. To be fair, the rooms were small and cramped, there was no lift, and the only views available from any room were of the walls of the adjacent buildings or the street outside. But, as she’d explained to Bronson, the whole point about being in Venice was to get out and see the city, not lounge around in a hotel bedroom all day, so in her opinion the views were much less important than the price.

  They’d caught a vaporetto back to the Fondamente Nuove stop from the Isola di San Michele a few minutes after the two carabinieri had left with the pathologist, but Angela had stubbornly refused to show him what she’d taken from the grave until they reached the hotel.

  The narrow streets were dark and silent as they walked towards their hotel, the only noise the lapping of the water in the canals beside them. There was something about the atmosphere Bronson didn’t like, and it was a relief when he saw the lights of the hotel lobby shining brightly in front of them.

  ‘Right, Angela,’ Bronson said, once they were safely inside their room, ‘what was it in the tomb that’s got you so excited?’

  ‘What we saw back there was the tomb of a vampire.’

  For a few seconds, Bronson just stared at her. Then his face creased into a smile, and he laughed. ‘Of course it was,’ he said. ‘Now stop messing around and tell me what you really mean.’

  Angela smiled back at him. ‘I’m being perfectly serious,’ she said. ‘Or, to be absolutely exact, the people who broke into that tomb about a century and a half ago were being perfectly serious.’

  ‘A vampire? But you and I both know that vampires don’t exist. Just like werewolves and krakens and golems don’t exist. They’re the product of myth and legend, nothing more than that.’

  ‘We know that, here and now in the twenty-first century. But it wasn’t always that clear cut, you know.’

  ‘But I thought Bram Stoker more or less invented the vampire myth when he wrote Dracula in, what, the late nineteenth century?’

  ‘No,’ Angela said. ‘Nobody knows exactly when people first started believing in vampires, but it certainly predates the Middle Ages, and possibly dates back a lot further than that, maybe as early as the Assyrians. There’s also some suspicion that vampire-like creatures were believed to exist in the countries surrounding the Mediterranean basin as early as five thousand BC, and one of the ancient Egyptian gods – Shezmu – had what you might call vampire-like habits. He was the old god of execution, slaughter, blood and wine, and often killed people by decapitating them, putting their heads in a wine press and drinking the blood that came out.’

  She paused for a moment to collect her thoughts, then spoke again. ‘If you search the literature, belief in vampires, or creatures that act in some way like vampires, seems to be endemic. Almost every culture, on every continent, has some kind of a legend of this type. And that includes places you wouldn’t normally expect, like Australasia and China, and even Mexico and the Caribbean.

  ‘And it wasn’t actually Bram Stoker who first wrote about it. In eighteen sixteen, almost a century before Stoker, Lord Byron was holidaying near Lake Geneva with friends and suggested they each write a ghost story. Byron came up with the idea of a tale about a vampire and one of his friends, in fact his personal physician, a man named John Polidori, picked it up and expanded it. This was the first time a vampyre – he spelt the word with a “y” instead of an “i” – had appeared in a piece of fiction written in English. But nearly a century earlier, in seventeen thirty-two, the word “vampyre” had first appeared in print in Britain, but then the word was being used as a political symbol.’

  ‘How come you know so much about vampires?’ Bronson demanded.

  Angela grinned at him. ‘I read a lot,’ she said. ‘Anyway, what I was going to say was that even as late as the first millennium, the world was still a very mysterious place, and people were looking around for explanations for natural phenomena that we now understand perfectly. They still believed that prayers to a god or spirit, or even a sacrifice, were absolutely necessary to ensure the rising of the sun or a good harvest, and the end of winter was still greeted with relief and celebrations. That was the kind of climate in which belief in vampires first arose, when superstition and belief in supernatural events and beings were the norm, not the exception.’

  ‘But a bloodsucking creature of the night? Where the hell did that come from?’ Bronson objected.

  ‘Nobody knows. It’s been a part of the folklore of Europe, and especially of central Europe, since records began. But it’s possible that this kind of creature was first assumed to exist as a reasonable explanation for something that otherwise made no sense.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Post-mortem changes to a body, for instance. If for any reason a grave was opened a short while after the burial had taken place, the people who looked at the corpse wouldn’t have understood what they were seeing. There might well be blood in and near the mouth, and the hair and nails would have grown, and the body would appear to be plump and well nourished. Medical science now knows exactly why these strange effects occur. After death, blood may be expelled from all orifices, not just the mouth, as a normal part of the decay process. The receding skin can make the hair and nails of the corpse appear longer, and the gases created by decomposition will bloat the body – you know that.’

  Bronson nodded. As a policeman, he’d grown used to seeing corpses in varying stages of decay.

  ‘Now put yourself in the position of somebody who’s just opened a fresh grave. You see a corpse that looks well fed, with hair and nails growing, and with blood on the mouth and face. Knowing nothing about what is actually happening inside the dead body, the most reasonable explanation might be that the corpse isn’t a corpse at all, and that somehow it’s managing to escape from the grave at night and is feeding on the blood of living things, hence the blood around its mouth. And if somebody in the neighbourhood is suffering from anaemia or consumption or some other wasting disease, you might also conclude that that person was the victim. Even the unexplained deaths of cattle or sheep might be attributed to the actions of a vampire.

  ‘And that’s probably all it would take for the legend to be born. As far as I know, nobody knows exactly when belief in vampires first started, but it quickly spread all over Europe, and was concentrated in Hungary and the Slav countries in the early eighteenth century. It was probably those legends that Byron, and later Bram Stoker, picked up on. And we do know that the word “vampire” itself was derived from the Serbo-Croat word vampir, and it entered the English language through either French or German, proba
bly also in the eighteenth century. It’s also true that many of the other Slavik and middle European languages, like Bulgarian and Croatian, had very similar words to describe the same phenomenon. But the actual root of the word probably comes from the Old Russian word upir, which was first recorded in the eleventh century.’

  ‘And what about crucifixes, garlic and a stake through the heart?’ Bronson asked.

  ‘You can thank Bram Stoker and Dracula for that,’ Angela said, ‘though I suppose the crucifix and the stake do make some kind of sense. A body arising from the grave to feed on the living is obviously demonic, and people might well think that such a creature would be frightened away by the symbol of the Christian religion. Driving a stake through the chest would destroy the heart and prevent it from circulating the blood, and that would kill the vampire as well. There’s another theory that impaling it with a stake would pin the vampire’s body to the earth and stop it moving.’

  ‘And garlic?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, but garlic was supposed to be a cure, or at least a preventative, for the plague, so there might be a link there. Actually, garlic’s been renowned as a deterrent against vampires in almost every culture that has legends about the creatures, but nobody seems to know why that should be. And before you ask, I’m fairly certain that vampires being destroyed by sunlight, not being visible in a mirror and not casting a shadow are all either creations of Mr Stoker’s imagination or embellishments added by later writers.’

  ‘Are you saying that vampires were linked to the plague?’ Bronson asked.

  Angela nodded. ‘At one time, almost everything was linked to the plague. The Black Death arrived in Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century, and nobody had the slightest idea what caused it. All they knew was that it was incredibly contagious, and that once you’d got it, it was effectively a death sentence. Wild theories abounded about the possible cause, everything from an unfavourable alignment of the planets to earthquakes that released foul air from the interior of the earth, and even a kind of ethnic cleansing orchestrated by aliens.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘I’m not. There were numerous reports of evil-looking, black-clad figures standing at the edges of towns waving a kind of wand that emitted a noxious fog, and anyone that the substance touched subsequently died of the plague. The accounts sound remarkably like descriptions of men wearing protective suits dispensing a chemical or biological weapon through some sort of pressurized dispersal system. Witnesses described the strangers as acting as if they were scything, swinging the wand from side to side, and it’s actually that image which gave us the expression “the grim reaper”.’

  ‘Your breadth of knowledge never ceases to amaze me,’ Bronson said.

  Angela smiled at him. ‘Well, history is my thing,’ she said. ‘It’s the minutiae, the details, which have always fascinated me. In some countries, particularly in Germany and Switzerland, the Jews were blamed for the plague, and records show that there were several massacres in which they were rounded up and killed, sometimes by being burned alive. Religious zealots believed the plague had been sent by God, and for some time flagellation became a popular cure. Travelling bands of flagellants roamed Europe, flogging themselves in the name of God, and in many cases very efficiently helping to spread the plague at the same time.

  ‘Perhaps the most common belief was that it was somehow caused by a miasma, by corrupted air, which harks back to that grim reaper image, and many of the preventative measures put in place were intended to combat this, to try to purify the air that people were breathing. So houses were washed with scented water, timber that was known to give off a pleasant smell, like juniper, was burned in fireplaces, and people carried garlic and vinegar to ward off the contagion. But, bizarrely, other people believed that the plague was spread by vampires, and extraordinary measures were taken to try to combat this.’

  ‘So we’ve come full circle,’ Bronson suggested. ‘We’re back to the woman in the grave.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Angela agreed. ‘The death toll from the Black Death was simply enormous. For obvious reasons, no accurate figures have survived, but it’s been conservatively estimated that in some towns where the plague took hold, as much as half, sometimes even two thirds, of the population died. This meant that individual burial of bodies was simply impossible. The dead were tossed into huge communal graves – plague pits. But for anyone suspected of being a vampire, special precautions had to be taken, to avoid the vampire feeding on the other victims buried alongside it in the pit. And perhaps the commonest preventative measure was to jam a brick between the vampire’s jaws.

  ‘Two or three years ago, right here in Venice, a plague pit was discovered and excavated, and one of the skulls from a female skeleton was recovered intact, with the brick still jammed into her mouth. That body dated from the sixteenth century, because although the Black Death was at its height in Europe in the fourteenth century, there were recurrences of the epidemic right up to the eighteenth century, and mass graves have been found that date from this whole period.’

  ‘Do you think somebody believed that the woman in the grave we saw tonight on the Isola di San Michele was a vampire, and applied an ancient remedy to ensure that she would stay dead and buried? So why did they also cut off her head?’

  ‘That was another traditional way of killing a vampire. Because they sucked blood from their victims, removing the head from the body would prevent them from feeding.’

  ‘So in her case it was a kind of belt and braces – the brick in the mouth and decapitation.’

  Angela nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘According to legend, most vampires were heretics, criminals or victims of suicide, and in most cases such people would be denied burial in a Christian graveyard because of religious sensibilities. The tomb that cracked open was quite an expensive burial chamber and, as far as I could see, she was the only occupant. If she had been suspected of being a vampire in life, even if she came from a wealthy and aristocratic family, she would probably have been buried in an unmarked grave on unconsecrated ground. That’s the first point.

  ‘The other thing that struck me was that the vertebra in her neck had crumbled when it was smashed. I’m not a forensic pathologist, obviously, but that suggests to me that the body was already at least partially skeletonized when the head was removed.’

  ‘So you think she was just buried in the usual way, and then several years later somebody decided that she might have been a vampire, cracked open the tomb, and did their best to ensure that she would stay there for eternity.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ Angela said, ‘except for three things. Did you notice anything odd about the grave?’

  ‘You mean apart from the decapitated body and the skull with the brick rammed into its jaw? No, not really.’

  Angela sighed. ‘Almost every tomb I looked at on that island had either a crucifix inscribed on the slab covering the grave or a separate stone cross standing at one end of it. That grave had neither, and that’s unusual.’

  Bronson looked puzzled, but didn’t say anything.

  ‘And the remains of those pottery jars we saw in the grave suggest something slightly different about the original burial,’ Angela went on. ‘I have a feeling that she probably was buried as a vampire, but by people who didn’t find that concept in any way offensive, a kind of vampire cult, if you like.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. I think those jars were deliberately smashed when the grave was opened later. Pottery was never normally placed inside Christian tombs, but if it had been, in a sealed environment, it should have remained intact. The fact that those jars – there were at least two of them – were broken suggests a deliberate act. And why would a pair of sealed pottery vessels be placed in a tomb? To me, the only thing that makes sense is that they were there for the benefit of the dead woman. And if they thought she was a vam
pire, they would probably have contained blood, most likely human blood. I’d love to get my hands on them and analyse what’s left of the contents.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ Bronson asked, startled. ‘A vampire cult?’

  ‘They’re not unknown,’ Angela said, ‘though I’m not aware of any operating in Venice around the time our woman was buried. The inscription on the lid of her tomb was badly weathered, but I did take a few pictures of it, and I’m pretty sure the year she died was eighteen twenty-five. At least that bit of the inscription was still legible. And I’m guessing that the grave was opened again before the end of the nineteenth century, and that the ritual killing of the vampire inside it took place then.’

  Bronson leaned back and stretched. The chair he was sitting in was cramped and really too small for him. ‘It seems to me that you’re deducing the existence of an entire – and pretty bizarre – secret society on the basis of a few bits of smashed pottery and one crumbled neck vertebra on a two-hundred-year-old skeleton.’

  ‘No, there’s something else.’ Angela reached into her handbag, and pulled out a small, heavily discoloured black object, which appeared to be bound in leather. ‘This was lying under the body,’ she said. ‘I think it was originally inside a wooden box, probably placed under the coffin, but over the centuries both the coffin and the box rotted away. I spotted what was left of the box underneath the skeleton, but when I touched it, the wood crumbled away to nothing and I saw this.’

  ‘So now you’re a grave robber,’ Bronson said.

  ‘I trained as an archaeologist,’ Angela replied, ‘and “archaeologist” is just a polite word for a tomb raider. It’s what we do. And if I hadn’t picked it up, it would have either been sealed up again in the grave or taken by some tourist who would have no idea what it was.’

  ‘And what is it?’

  ‘I think,’ Angela said, ‘it’s a kind of diary.’