The Nosferatu Scroll Read Online Free PDF Page A

tombstones and, moments later, found themselves facing a group of men and women who were standing in a rough circle, staring at one of the larger tombs.
    Bronson’s police training kicked in, despite the fact that he was about a thousand miles from his home beat. He switched to Italian and pulled out his British warrant card—he knew it would mean absolutely nothing to anybodythere, but it would give him a thin veneer of authority while he found out what had so alarmed everyone in the cemetery.
    “Police. Let me through….Police officer,” he kept repeating, waving the warrant card like a talisman as he pushed his way through the unmoving crowd, Angela following just a few feet behind him.
    Almost reluctantly the people parted to allow him passage. Unusually for any group of Italians, they were almost silent, staring in fascination at something on the ground in front of them. And then Bronson reached the middle of the group, and could see precisely what had sparked the general exodus from the area.
    The Festival of the Dead was in some ways a misnomer. The revelers who traveled to the cemetery were not there to celebrate the dead, but rather to celebrate the lives and memories of friends and relatives who had passed away. Absolutely the last thing they expected to see in the cemetery was an actual body. But that was the sight that now confronted Bronson.
    And it wasn’t just any corpse.
    “Fascinating,” Angela breathed as she stopped beside him and looked down at the tomb. “Though I can’t believe this was the cause of so much panic in the crowd.”
    Bronson took a couple of steps forward to study the tomb.
    It was clearly one of the older burial chambers in the cemetery, an oblong stone box about four feet high and topped by a flat stone slab. The sides were carved withsymbols or scenes, but the old stone had weathered so much that it was difficult to make out exactly what was depicted, while the slab on top bore faint and virtually illegible marks—presumably an ancient inscription that gave the name and date of death of the occupant.
    Bronson didn’t know exactly how it had happened, but one of the sides of the tomb had cracked into three pieces and then fallen out, and in doing so had dragged the upper slab of stone with it. That must have caused the sound they’d heard, he thought. And now the previously sealed box was open to the elements, and the body inside exposed to view for the first time in what he guessed was at least a hundred years.
    Unsurprisingly, the remains were mainly skeletal. Parts of the coffin had survived, but only as fragments of wood along both sides of the corpse. A few wisps of rotted cloth still clung to the long bones of the legs, and part of the rib cage was encased in leathery, dark brown skin. In short, the corpse looked almost exactly as one might expect a body to appear if it had been buried in a wooden coffin inside a sealed tomb for more than a century. Except in two respects.
    Above the rib cage the neck terminated in a single shattered vertebra. The head of the body, which, like the rib cage, was still partially covered in skin, and even had a few tufts of white hair clinging to it, was positioned centrally between the bony feet. That was unusual enough in itself, but to add a further layer of the macabre to the scene, the mouth of the skull had been levered open and a thin half brick jammed firmly between the jaws.
    For a few seconds, Bronson stared at the desiccated—and desecrated—corpse; then he glanced sideways at Angela. “What did you mean when you said ‘fascinating?’” he asked.
    “I’ll explain later,” she said. “This is something I’ve heard about and read about, but I never thought I’d actually get to see an example of it.”
    She opened her handbag, pulled out a compact digital camera and started snapping pictures of the scene before them. She moved closer to the corpse, and took several shots of the severed neck and the head with its bizarre