The Nosferatu Scroll by James Becker

then aimed the weapon at her and squeezed the trigger. The girl shrank back as the evil blue spark jumped from one electrode to the other with an audible crack.
    “What do you want with me?” she said, her voice trembling with fear.
    “You’ll find out soon enough,” the man snapped. “Now, do exactly what we tell you, or—” He triggered the Taser again, then pointed toward the house. “Go up there,” he ordered.
    Marietta stared around her, at the small island with its grass-covered slopes, clumps of bushes and occasional small trees, and at the house itself. Beyond it lay the waters of the Venetian lagoon. Pockets of mist were drifting over the surface, driven by light breezes. She looked at the pitiless faces of the three men who had abducted her from the city of her birth. A surge of pure terror coursed through her body as she realized she was beyond help.
    “I have a friend,” she said desperately. “I was on my way to visit him. When I don’t arrive, he’ll call the police.”
    The man with the Taser smiled at her, but it was not a smile of amusement. “I’ve no doubt he will, and I’m surethe carabinieri will make all the right noises and do their best to reassure him. But we left no clues, and nobody saw what we did. It’s as if you simply vanished from the face of the earth. The police will never find us, or you. And even if they did,” he added, “it wouldn’t make any difference, because you’re not the first.”
    Marietta stared at him, and then she screamed, a cry of terror that stopped only when the last vestige of breath had been driven from her lungs.
    “Feel better now? Get moving. We have people waiting for you.”
    Marietta gasped for breath and stared round again, looking desperately for anything or anyone that might offer her some hope. But there was nothing.

6
    “A diary? You mean a
vampire
diary?” Bronson asked. “Are you serious?”
    “I’ve only had a very quick look at it,” Angela said, “but as far as I can tell it contains a list of dates and events, which is pretty much the definition of a diary, I suppose.”
    “So what are these events? If they’re written in Italian, you’ll probably need my help to translate them.”
    “Actually, I won’t,” Angela said, “unless you’ve added Latin to your repertoire of languages. At the time this burial originally took place, Latin was still being used as an international language, and it remained the language of classical scholarship right through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even today some documents and treatises are composed in Latin, and of course it’s still the official written language of the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican.”
    She leaned forward and handed the book carefully to Bronson.
    “Our woman was buried in the first half of the nineteenth century. If she came from an educated and aristocratic family, which she probably did if her tomb is anything to go by, she might well have spoken Italian or a local dialect in daily life, but she would certainly have been able to read Latin, and probably would have used it for all her letters and written communications. Frankly, I’d have been amazed if the language in the book was anything other than Latin.”
    “So what have you translated so far?” Bronson asked.
    “I haven’t had time to do more than glance at a few of the pages. But I’ve already found several references to blood, to its healing and rejuvenating properties, and in a couple of places there are descriptions of rituals that seem to involve drinking blood. I really think this might be a vampire’s diary.”
    Bronson groaned. “Does this mean that our sightseeing holiday is now going to be replaced by the two of us sitting in this hotel room translating a two-hundred-year-old diary, written by someone who thought she was a vampire?”
    Angela grinned. “Of course not. This is just a curio. Nobody knows we found it, and it’s frankly of little or no interest to anybody