Yeah, the archive idea was pretty cool. Seems like there could be a story in that. Wonder if Dracula would have his own copy of the Dracula Ring there?
from: Gaetan Cornichon
to: Michael Harket
date: December 10, 2018 12:10 PM
subject: Re: Sick
No luck with the doctor. She says I’ve most likely got one of the many viruses currently making the rounds. She took a blood sample, but more as a precaution than anything else. Told me to go home and rest for a couple of days, which is what it seems like I’ve been doing forever, at this point. You ever feel so awful, even the light hurts your skin?
It’s funny: for a short time, right around Halloween, I was feeling pretty good, as in, better than I have in a while, since all the stuff with my heart last year. Don’t know what happened.
from: Michael Harket
to: Gaetan Cornichon
date: December 11, 2018 6:49 AM
subject: Re: Sick
Well, the obvious answer would be the Dracula Ring, wouldn’t it?
from: Gaetan Cornichon
to: Michael Harket
date: December 11, 2018 8:30 PM
subject: Re: Sick
Yeah, but the ring as what made me feel better, or worse? Or both?
from: Michael Harket
to: Gaetan Cornichon
date: December 22, 2018 9:12 AM
subject: Siodmak Book
Haven’t heard from you in a little while. Hope this means you’re over whatever’s been plaguing you and busy with pre-Christmas insanity. I thought I’d send along something you might find interesting. Instead of finishing my story for you-know-who, I spent the past week reading Siodmak’s memoirs. (Did I tell you I’d bought a copy of them for myself? I found a great deal on eBay, and my curiosity won out.) Turns out, they had much less to say about the Dracula Ring than I’d hoped; still a fascinating read (quitter). Siodmak was part of the wave of German Jews who fled the rise of Nazism first for the UK and then the US. Before he left Germany, he was already a novelist, already working in film. When he came to America, he ended up in Hollywood, where he wrote all kinds of scripts, including, most famously, The Wolf Man, which invented the modern take on the werewolf. His book ranges back and forth in time, not so much in a stream-of-consciousness way as in an old-man-reminiscing-beside-the-fireplace fashion.
Anyway, he says he’s surprised by how many people have asked him about the ring, says he’s been pestered by a small but persistent group of fans to divulge its origins. (I wonder if this includes old Forrest Ackerman? He was Siodmak’s literary agent at one point and owner of a Dracula ring, though whether one of the originals I’m not sure.) Believe it or not, Siodmak was told about a ring associated with Vlad by none other than Bela Lugosi. (Lugosi, you may recall, was Hungarian. Well, he was born in what’s now Romania, in a city called Lugoj [the source of his stage name]. This is on the western side of the Western Carpathian mountains. These form one border of the Transylvanian plateau. That’s right: Ground Zero for Vlad Ţepeş, Dracula, himself. [Although the exact location of his HQ remains in dispute; central-south Romania being a reasonable guess.] If you stretch things a little, you could say that Lugosi’s hometown is in the same general vicinity as Čachtice Castle, the home of Elizabeth Bathory [which is in modern day Slovakia]. You can appreciate how much I’d like to find a connection between Lugoj and either someplace associated with Vlad or Bathory’s castle, an old trade route, say, but nothing so far has popped up.)
(And no, none of this is information I have at my fingertips. As usual, I fell down the rabbit hole of research, and have decided to share the fruits of my labors with you.)
Apparently, Lugosi had been told about a ring associated with Vlad by his local priest, a man learned in all manner of subjects. According to this fellow, in his later life, Vlad undertook something called the Blood Pilgrimage, to a monastery somewhere in western Europe, maybe France, maybe Spain. (Shades of Kostova, right? I wonder if she had this in mind—seems too big a coincidence not to be the case.) He was looking for power, for the means to maintain his perilous military supremacy over the Ottoman Turks, not to mention, his local rivals. The Pilgrimage was supposed to give him access to a source of undying strength, but reaching that power was a journey fraught with peril. This is where the ring comes in. It was fashioned to function as a guide, to lead whoever was wearing it safely to something called the Four Communions. Incised in the ring’s design was the letter D, for the Latin Dominus. (Now there’s a word with all sorts of resonance, from “master” to [more distantly] “taming/subduing,” “building,” and “home.”) The ring helped Vlad find what he was searching for, but at a monstrous cost (the whole living dead thing). A hundred-plus years later, the ring was supposed to have found its way to the finger of Elizabeth Bathory. Following her conviction as a mass murderer, and her imprisonment in her chambers, she passed it to an unidentified guard. At some point afterward, it made its way to Greece, where there was a rumor Lord Byron held it before he died.
Siodmak thought the ring would give him the chance to create a new origin for the vampire, much as he had for the werewolf. When he sat down to write the story for House of Frankenstein (which I believe was the first of the Universal movies to feature the unholy trinity of Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein’s monster) he included a scene where the Count connects the ring to the process by which he became a member of the undead. Siodmak stuck pretty close to what he’d heard from Lugosi, the ring as a means to gaining the power of the vampire. He was pretty pleased with what he came up with, but the actual screenwriter, Edward T. Lowe, chose to omit most of it from his script. There’s a bit where Dracula is trying to hypnotize a prospective victim, and he shows her the ring, which gives her a weird vision of a place filled with shadowy forms, but nothing more. I guess it was enough, because the ring subsequently became part of Dracula’s regalia, both in the remaining Universal movies and in the Hammer films, where it clung to Christopher Lee’s finger.
That’s about it for the ring, at least, for what Siodmak has to say about it. One more detail of interest: the design for the ring came from Lugosi, who worked with the costume person on it. I’m not sure if this is as significant as I’d like it to be…
I have to be careful—I can imagine this turning into one of those projects that swallows you whole. But hey! nothing’s wasted on a writer, right?
Oh, and one more thing: I wanted to have another look at the story you sent me, but when I went to open the file, I got an error message saying it couldn’t be accessed due to file corruption. It’s likely something on my end, but you may want to check your machine, just in case. And I know you said you were done with it, but if you want to send me another copy…
from: Gaetan Cornichon
to: Michael Harket
date: December 26, 2018 10:29 PM
subject: Second Attempt
Wow—it’s like having my own research assistant. (What were we saying about Dracula’s archive?) Not sure what I’ll do with the info, though it gives a bit more weight—more substance to this piece of jewelry sitting on my finger. Thanks for passing it on to me.
Weird about the story. Don’t worry about it. I can’t say I’m feeling any different. The doctor called with the results of the blood test, which were inconclusive, because of course they would be, you know? There was something slightly off in one of the columns, so she wants me to have them redone in another couple of weeks. Can’t be anything too serious, right? In the meantime, I’ve accepted that I’m just going to have to get used to feeling this way and push ahead. It sounds stupid, but you know what helps? The ring. I put it on, and it’s as if I’m assuming a role, one where whatever is plaguing me is part of me, something bringing me a kind of twisted satisfaction, even happiness. Once I’m in this head sp
ace, writing is easier. It’s kind of like the ring is—not dictating to me, but collaborating, helping me to put down what I want to. This is my way of saying, I came up with a (somewhat) different way to tackle what I’m calling the Dracula Ring story, so I decided to sit down at the laptop and see what happened.
Be curious to know what you think.
STOP MAKING SENSE
Ridiculous, to be afraid of her husband, to be lying in bed with her heart galloping, fear potent as moonshine roiling in her stomach.
(Is someone standing in the corner of the room? No. She thinks.)
Afraid for him, sure. In nineteen years of marriage, twenty-three together, there has been no shortage of occasions when Joyce has worried about George: like when he was applying for his first teaching job post college, tenth-grade history at Most Precious Blood, and he didn’t have an education degree, just his MA from UConn (because, he said, if you wanted to teach history, shouldn’t you have to know history?), and he was working at Enterprise and hating it, and although he confided in her that he wasn’t sure he could teach high school, after all, he was so desperately unhappy renting cars anything seemed as if it would be better. And then he was certain he’d blown the interview with the principal, Monsignor Bellew, a man with no sense of humor, and while Joyce reassured him, said it sounded as if his meeting with the priest had gone fine, privately, she had been convinced his nervous attempt at humor (“Don’t worry, Father, I’m fine with teaching the Catholic version of history.”) had torpedoed the interview before it had left port, and she didn’t know what George would do if the job fell through and he was stuck for another six months attempting to talk renters into upgrading their class of vehicle and taking out the additional insurance. She had never witnessed her husband so unhappy, for so long, as if adulthood (if this was what their post-college existence in fact was) had turned out to be a trick, the disappointing toy surprise at the bottom of the box of cereal you’d nagged your mom to buy specifically for its treasure.
Though that was nothing compared to last year, when several incidents of light-headedness sent him to his doctor, who referred him to a cardiologist, who ordered what seemed like every test their insurance would cover—up to and including a portable heart monitor, which George had to wear for two days and which resembled an iPod and hung from his neck in a blue pouch and was attached to his chest by five electrodes whose connecting wires snaked into the top of the monitor, the sight of which, when he pulled off his T-shirt to show her, had made Joyce’s head swim, her stomach lurch (not that she had disclosed either of those reactions in front of George: concerned about upsetting him, she pushed down her panic and said, “Oh, they shaved your chest,” which the nurse had, in order to ensure the electrodes stayed in place, the observation allowing her to channel her flood of anxiety into humor, into jokes about manscaping, which was the response she maintained for the remaining time George wore the monitor, and then for the additional two days it took the cardiologist to review the results and call to say everything appeared to be fine). It was as if, in a single instant, she had stepped into middle-age, the neighborhood each birthday told her she must be drawing nearer to, possibly residing in already, a message almost comically absurd: she was a mother of young(ish) children, with whom she shared an interest in contemporary music and movies; she was conversant with current technology; she paid attention to fashion trends and adopted the flattering ones. In no part of her life did she display any of the ossification suggested by the words middle-aged, the calcification of taste and knowledge her parents had been overtaken by when she was a teenager and old enough to notice such things. Yet here she was all the same, walking cracked and pitted sidewalks whose surface might collapse at any moment and drop the man she had spent just about half her life with into darkness, into a hole in the ground that would swallow whole him and everything about him, from his passion for basketball (despite knees beginning to protest it) to his love of obscure movies (his current favorite Ardor, a bizarre, semi-pornographic French-Canadian take on Dracula) to his absolute loathing for anything pickled—all of it gone, and she and the kids left to cope with the George-size tear in their lives.
No doubt about it, then had been bad, maybe the worst, and there were ways in which she didn’t think she’d fully recovered from it, not least of them her new appreciation for the implications of middle-aged, namely, that you were halfway across a bridge which only grew more frail and rickety the farther you went on it, and which did not take you anyplace, just broke off in the air and sent you plummeting out of sight, a realization whose short-term impact had been to impart new vigor to her and George’s sex life, driving them to bed with a frequency and passion reminiscent of their early years together, before the responsibilities of work and kids had regularized and tempered their physical relationship, and whose long-term impact had been to make Joyce more patient with George, more indulgent when he wanted to drive into Boston on a weeknight to see his favorite band, or when he wanted to go out to dinner even though there was plenty of food in the house, or when he wanted to spend what seemed to her too much on a ring whose claim to fame was its role as a prop in a series of movies right around the time they started to slide downhill. Better than a sports car, she told herself after he explained the charge on the Visa, or a girlfriend, those traditional remedies to the anxieties of male aging.
This ring, though. Silly to think that her lying here in (their) bed began the day George tore the wrapping paper off the box it had been shipped in and eased it onto his finger. Where was the close-up of the ring on his finger, the dramatic music on the soundtrack to foreshadow what was on the way?
It’s supposed to be the kind of thing a medieval aristocrat would have worn, proof of status, the raised design on it suitable for pressing into hot wax at the bottom of official documents. Joyce doesn’t know if the coat of arms rising in silver lines from the polished wood setting is the crest of an actual royal or noble house, or if it’s an invention, designed by a Hollywood costumer; because of its appearance in various horror movies, she’s assumed the latter, but the design could have been taken from history, or at least based in it. When George has removed the ring (which he’s done less and less, lately), she’s studied the silver image on it. At the top, there’s a five-pointed crown, with a weird squiggle underneath it, which could be the visor of a helmet or a stylized face. Below, wings outspread, is a bat (the first detail to make her wonder at the image’s authenticity: is a bat the kind of animal you’d find on a medieval crest?) hovering over a shield on which two pairs of three-pointed crowns flank a capital letter D (the second feature to cast doubt on the coat of arms: would the first letter of a name whose translation might vary from language to language be appropriate to such a design? [in this regard, the bat actually makes more sense—unless what she’s taken as a D is in fact something else, a coffin, maybe]). Despite its size, stretching from the knuckle of George’s long middle finger past the first joint, the ring is light, probably because the part of it she took for wood is resin or plastic. (George joked it was bone, stained with blood, which was morbidly amusing at first, now less so.) Whatever the material, it’s deeply unpleasant to the touch, prickly in a way belying its apparent smoothness, as if it’s covered in tiny bristles, like the abdomen of a tarantula, or needles, like a cactus.
Cost aside (which wasn’t too much, not really), as George presented it, buying the former costume accessory made sense as a prop for another role, his as up-and-coming author of smart, self-knowing horror novels that have (astonishingly) drawn praise from several of the writers he and she grew up reading, and whose success has resulted in a steady stream of invitations to appear on podcasts and even network TV on a couple of local morning shows. Before the ring, he was already letting his hair grow out of the short cut he’s kept it in for the last decade, allowing his intermittent goatee to take hold and spread up the line of his
jaw to join his sideburns, the beard arriving with enough gray to make him appear distinguished, a quality he modified his wardrobe to emphasize. Although still wearing T-shirts printed with the names and logos of his favorite bands, books, and movies, he added unbuttoned shirts and occasionally a dress jacket over them, all in dark colors, navy, charcoal, black, switching his jeans for slacks at the same end of the spectrum, and his Converse for black Doc Martens. For a long time, he looked extremely uncomfortable in the jacket and slacks, self-conscious, the little kid playing the adult, David Byrne in his enormous suit in Stop Making Sense. Joyce found this odd. With the exception of the T-shirt and boots, the ensemble was the same one he’d worn to teach history in for nine and a half months of every year for the last sixteen, not to mention, what he dressed in for family functions, holidays, birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, marriages, and funerals. She asked him about it, only to have him insisting she was mistaken, which she was not, but knew better than to argue over. If he wanted to talk about it, he would. This hasn’t stopped Joyce reflecting on the matter and (tentatively) concluding that the semi-formal clothes he’s worn to his job and family duties are to him a kind of camouflage he dons when he’s pretending to be an adult, same as everyone else, nothing to see here, move along—whereas the Jaws T-shirt, faded jeans, and Converse are the clothes of the writer, his true identity, not the opposite of an adult, necessarily, but positioned at a weird angle to it. It’s its own type of costume, one expressing who he is—or who he wants to think of himself as—as opposed to concealing it. Now, with the continuing success of his fiction requiring personal appearances for which the publicist at his publisher advised him to dress appropriately, he’s had to change the clothes in which he was comfortable for ones a little too close to his disguise as just another member of society. Joyce connects his discomfort to an anxiety her husband has confided to her, namely, that each new novel will not be as good as the previous one, resulting in him being found out as a fake, an impostor. It’s as if the clothes are an emblem for this complex of emotions.
Final Cuts Page 37
