The Nosferatu Scroll by James Becker Read Free Book Online Page A

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 many 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 beensuspected 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 vertebrae 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