The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  Dissolve

  4. Forest of Stakes

  Past which we move. The sward is wild with mountain weeds, the stakes tilted at a variety of dutch angles, the execution field unused and not seriously tended for a long time.

  Dissolve

  5. What Was Once a Good-Sized Prison Stockade

  All that now remains, with one exception, are the individual plots, surrounded by thorn fences, on which the hostages were kept, free and yet safe from each other and the landscape at large. (Bones in several of the plots indicate that here there were once human cattle, kept for blood.)

  Dissolve

  6. A Wolf Pit

  In the f.g., a great shaggy dire wolf, bound by a silver chain, is outlined against the fawn murk. He raises himself slowly, with more thought than an animal should display, and looks out across the estates of Count Dracula, to the distant light glowing in the castle on the mountain. The wolf howls, a child of the night, making sweet music.

  Dissolve

  7. A Trench Below the Walls

  A slow-scuttling armadillo. A crawling giant beetle. Reflected in the muddy water -- the lighted window.

  Dissolve

  8. The Moat

  Angled spears sag. An old notebook floats on the surface of the water – its pages covered in shorthand scribble. As it moves across the frame, it discloses again the reflection of the window in the castle, closer than before.

  Dissolve

  9. A Drawbridge

  Over the wide moat, now stagnant and choked with weeds. We move across it and through a huge rounded archway into a formal courtyard, perhaps thirty feet wide and one hundred yards deep, which extends right up to the very wall of the castle. Let’s see Toland keep all of it in focus. The landscaping surrounding it has been sloppy and casual for centuries, but this particular courtyard has been kept up in perfect shape. As the camera makes its way through it, towards the lighted window of the castle, there are revealed rare and exotic blooms of all kinds: mariphasa lupino lumino, strange orchid, audriensis junior, triffidus celestus. The dominating note is one of almost exaggerated wildness, sprouting sharp and desperate – rot, rot, rot. The Hall of the Mountain King, the night the last troll died. Some of the plants lash out, defensively.

  Dissolve

  10. The Window

  Camera moves in until the frame of the window fills the frame of the screen. Suddenly the light within goes out. This stops the action of the camera and cuts the music (Bernard Herrmann) which has been accompanying the sequence. In the glass panes of the window we see reflected the stark, dreary mountainscape of the Dracula estate behind and the dawn sky.

  Dissolve

  11. Int. Corridor in Castle Dracula – Faint Dawn – 1885

  Ornate mirrors line both walls of the corridor, reflecting arches into infinity. A bulky shadow figure – Dracula – proceeds slowly, heavy with years, through the corridor. He pauses to look into the mirror, and has no reflection, no reflections, to infinity. It seems at last that he is simply not there.

  Dissolve

  12. Int. Dracula’s Crypt – Faint Dawn – 1885

  A very long shot of Dracula’s enormous catafalque, silhouetted against the enormous window.

  Dissolve

  13. Int. Dracula’s Crypt – Faint Dawn – 1885

  An eye. An incredible one. Big impossible drops of bloody tears, the reflections of figures coming closer, cutting implements raised. The jingling of sleigh bells in the musical score now makes an ironic reference to Indian temple bells – the music freezes ––

  DRACULA’S OLD VOICE

  Rose’s blood!

  The camera pulls back to show the eye in the face of the old Dracula, bloated with blood but his stolen youth lost again, grey skin parchmented like a mummy, fissures cracking open in the wrinkles around his eyes, fangteeth too large for his mouth, pouching his cheeks and stretching his lips, the nose an improbable bulb. A flash – the descent of a guillotine-like kukri knife, which has been raised above Dracula’s neck – across the screen. The head rolls off the neck and bounds down two carpeted steps leading to the catafalque, the camera following. The head falls off the last step onto the marble floor where it cracks, snaky tendrils of blood glittering in the first ray of the morning sun. This ray cuts an angular pattern across the floor, suddenly crossed with a thousand cruciform bars of light as a dusty curtain is wrested from the window.

  14. The Foot of Dracula’s Catafalque

  The camera very close. Outlined against the uncurtained window we can see a form – the form of a man, as he raises a bowie knife over his head. The camera moves down along the catafalque as the knife descends into Dracula’s heart, and rests on the severed head. Its lips are still moving. The voice, a whisper from the grave

  DRACULA’S OLD VOICE

  Rose’s blood!

  In the sunlight, a harsh shadow cross falling upon it, the head lap-dissolves into a fanged, eyeless skull.

  Fade Out

  III

  COUNT DRACULA

  Cast and Credits, as of January, 1940.

  Production Company: Mercury Productions. Distributor: R.K.O. Radio Pictures. Executive Producer: George J. Schaefer. Producer: Orson Welles. Director: Orson Welles. Script: Herman J. Mankiewicz, Orson Welles. From the novel by Bram Stoker. Director of Photography: Gregg Toland. Editors: Mark Robson, Robert Wise. Art Director: Van Nest Polglase. Special Effects: Vernon L. Walker. Music/Musical Director: Bernard Herrmann.

  Orson Welles (Dracula), Joseph Cotten (Jedediah Renfield), Everett Sloane (Van Helsing), Dorothy Comingore (Mina Murray), Robert Coote (Artie Holmwood), William Alland (Jon Harker), Agnes Moorehead (Mrs Westenra), Lucille Ball (Lucy), George Couloris (Dr Walter Parkes Seward), Paul Stewart (Raymond, Asylum Attendant), Alan Ladd (Quincey P. Morris), Fortunio Bonanova (Inn-Keeper at Bistritz), Vladimir Sokoloff (Szgany Chieftain), Dolores Del Rio, Ruth Warrick, Rita Cansino (Vampire Brides), Gus Schilling (Skipper of the Demeter).

  IV

  “Mademoiselle Dieudonné,” intoned the voice on her answering machine, halfway between a growl and a purr, “this is Orson Welles.”

  The voice was deeper even than in the 1930s, when he was a radio star. Geneviève had been in America over Halloween, 1938, when Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air broadcast their you-are-there dramatization of H.G. Wells’ “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” and convinced half the Eastern seaboard that the country was disappearing under a writhing plague of vampire blossoms. She remembered also the whisper of “who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”, followed by the triumphant declaration “the Shadow knows!” and the low chuckle which rose by terrifying lurches to a fiendish, maniacal shriek of insane laughter.

  When she had first met the man himself, in Rome in 1959, the voice hadn’t disappointed. Now, even on cheap tape and through the tinny, tiny amplifier, it was a call to the soul. Even hawking brandy or frozen peas, the voice was a powerful instrument. That Welles had to compete with Welles imitators for gigs as a commercial pitchman was one of the tragedies of the modern age. Then again, she suspected he drew a deal of sly enjoyment from his long-running role as a ruined titan. As an actor, his greatest role was always himself. Even leaving a message on a machine, he invested phrases with the weight – a quality he had more than a sufficiency of – of a Shakespearean deathbed speech.

  “There is a small matter upon which I should like your opinion, in your capacities as a private detective and a member of the undead community. If you would call on me, I should be most grateful.”

  She thought about it. Welles was as famous for being broke as for living well. It was quite likely he wouldn’t even come through with her modest rate of hundred dollars a day, let alone expenses. And gifts of rare wine or Cuban cigars weren’t much use to her, though she supposed she could redeem them for cash.

  Still, she was mildly bored with finding lost children or bail-jumpers. And no one ever accused Welles of being boring. He had left the message while she was restin
g through the hours of the day. This was the first of the ten or so days between the Gregorian 1980s and the Julian 1980s. She could afford to give a flawed genius – his own expression – that much time.

  She would do it.

  In leaving a message, Welles had given her a pause to think. She heard heavy breaths as he let the tape run on, his big man’s lungs working. Then, confident that he had won her over, he cut in with address details, somewhere in Beverly Hills.

  “I do so look forward to seeing you again. Until then, remember . . . the weed of crime bears bitter fruit!”

  It was one of his old radio catchphrases.

  He did the laugh, the King Laugh, the Shadow Laugh. It properly chilled her bones, but made her giggle too.

  V

  She discovered Orson Welles at the centre of attention, on the cracked bottom of a drained pool behind a rented bungalow. Three nude vampire girls waved objects – a luminous skull, a Macbethian blooded dagger, a fully-articulated monster bat puppet – at him, darting swiftly about his bulky figure, nipping at his head with their Halloween props. The former Boy Wonder was on his knees, enormous Russian shirt open to the waist, enormous (and putty) nose glistening under the lights, enormous spade-beard flecked with red syrup. A man with a hand-held camera, the sort of thing she’d seen used to make home movies, circled the odd quartet, not minding if the vampires got between him and his director-star.

  A few other people were around the pool, holding up lights. No sound equipment, though: this was being shot silent. Geneviève hung back, by the bungalow, keeping out of the way of the work. She had been on film sets before, at Cinecittà and in Hollywood, and knew this crew would be deemed skeletal for a student short. If anyone else were directing, she’d have supposed he was shooting make-up tests or a rehearsal. But with Welles, she knew that this was the real film. It might end up with the dialogue out of sync, but it would be extraordinary.

  Welles was rumbling through a soliloquy.

  It took her a moment to realize what the undead girls were doing, then she had to swallow astonished laughter. They were nude not for the titillation of an eventual audience, for they wouldn’t be seen. Non-reflecting nosferatu would be completely invisible when the footage was processed. The girls were naked because clothes would show up on film, though some elders – Dracula had been one – so violated the laws of optics that they robbed any costume they wore of its reflection also, sucking even that into their black hearts. In the final film, Welles would seem to be persecuted by malignly animated objects – the skull, the dagger and the bat. Now, he tore at his garments and hair like Lear, careful to leave his nose alone, and called out to the angry heavens. The girls flitted, slender and deathly white, not feeling the cold, faces blank, hands busy.

  This was the cheapest special effect imaginable.

  Welles fell forward on his face, lay still for a couple of beats and hefted himself upright, out of character, calling “cut”. His nose was mashed.

  A dark woman with a clipboard emerged from shadows to confer with the master. She wore a white fur coat and a matching hat. The vampire girls put the props down and stood back, nakedness unnoticed by the crew members. One took a cloak-like robe from a chair and settled it over her slim shoulders. She climbed out of the pool.

  Geneviève had not announced herself. The vampire girl fixed her eye. She radiated a sense of being fed up with the supposed glamour of show business.

  “Turning was supposed to help my career,” she said. “I was going to stay pretty forever and be a star. Instead, I lost my image. I had good credits. I was up for the last season of Charlie’s Angels. I’d have been the blonde.”

  “There’s always the theatre,” Geneviève suggested.

  “That’s not being a star,” the girl said.

  She was obviously a new-born, impatient with an eternity she didn’t yet understand. She wanted all her presents now, and no nonsense about paying dues or waiting her turn. She had cropped blonde hair, very pale, almost translucent skin stretched over bird-delicate bones and a tight, hard, cute little face, with sharp angles and glinting teeth, small reddish eyes. Her upper arm was marked by parallel claw-marks, not yet healed, like sergeant’s stripes. Geneviève stored away the detail.

  “Who’s that up there, Nico?” shouted one of the other girls.

  Nico? Not the famous one, Geneviève supposed.

  “Who?” the girl asked, out loud. “Famous?”

  Nico – indeed, not the famous one – had picked the thought out of Geneviève’s mind. That was a common elder talent, but unusual in a new-born. If she lasted, this girl might do well. She’d have to pick a new name though, to avoid confusion with the singer of “All Tomorrow’s Parties”.

  “Another one of us,” the starlet said, to the girl in the pool. “An invisible.”

  “I’m not here for a part,” Geneviève explained. “I’m here to see Mr Welles.”

  Nico looked at her askew. Why would a vampire who wasn’t an actress be here? Tumblers worked in the new-born’s mind. It worked both ways: Nico could pick words up, but she also sent them out. The girls in the pool were named Mink and Vampi (please!), and often hung with Nico.

  “You’re old, aren’t you?”

  Geneviève nodded. Nico’s transparent face showed eagerness.

  “Does it come back? Your face in the mirror?”

  “Mine hasn’t.”

  Her face fell, a long way. She was a loss to the profession. Her feelings were all on the surface, projected to the back stalls.

  “Different bloodlines have different qualities,” Geneviève said, trying to be encouraging.

  “So I heard.”

  Nico wasn’t interested in faint hopes. She wanted instant cures.

  “Is that Mademoiselle Dieudonné?” roared the familiar voice.

  “Yes, Orson, it’s me,” she said.

  Nico reacted, calculating. She was thinking that Geneviève might be an important person.

  “Then that’s a wrap for the evening. Thank you, people. Submit your expenses to Oja, and be back here tomorrow night, at midnight sharp. You were all stupendous.”

  Oja was the woman with the clipboard: Oja Kodar, Welles’ companion and collaborator. She was from Yugoslavia, another refugee washed up on this California shore.

  Welles seemed to float out of the swimming pool, easily hauling his enormous girth up the ladder by the strength of his own meaty arms. She was surprised at how light he was on his feet.

  He pulled off his putty nose and hugged her.

  “Geneviève, Geneviève, you are welcome.”

  The rest of the crew came up, one by one, carrying bits of equipment.

  “I thought I’d get Van Helsing’s mad scene in the can,” explained Welles.

  “Neat trick with the girls.”

  The twinkle in his eye was almost Santa Clausian. He gestured hypnotically.

  “Elementary movie magic,” he said. “Georges Méliès could have managed it in 1897.”

  “Has it ever been done before? I don’t recall seeing a film with the device.”

  “As a matter of fact, I think it’s an invention of my own. There are still tricks to be teased out of the cinema. Even after so many years - a single breath for you, my dear – the talkies are not quite perfected. My little vampires may have careers as puppeteers, animators. You’d never see their hands. I should shoot a short film, for children.”

  “You’ve been working on this for a long time?”

  “I had the idea at about seven o’clock this evening,” he said, with a modest chuckle. “This is Hollywood, my dear, and you can get anything with a phone call. I got my vampires by ordering out, like pizza.”

  Geneviève guessed the invisible girls were hookers, a traditional career option for those who couldn’t make a showing in the movies. Some studio execs paid good money to be roughed up by girls they’d pass over with contempt at cattle calls. And vampires, properly trained, could venture into areas of pain and pleasure a w
arm girl would find uncomfortable, unappetising or unhealthy.

  She noticed Nico had latched on to a young, male assistant and was alternately flirting with him and wheedling at him for some favour. Welles was right: she could have a career as a puppet-mistress.

  “Come through into the house, Geneviève,” said Welles. “We must talk.”

  The crew and the girls bundled together. Oja, as production manager, arranged for them to pool up in several cars and be returned to their homes or – in the case of Nico, Mink and Vampi – to a new club where there were hours to be spent before the dawn. Gary, the cameraman, wanted to get the film to the lab and hurried off on his own to an all-night facility. Many movie people kept vampire hours without being undead.

  There was an after-buzz in the air. Geneviève wondered if it was genius, or had some of the crew been sniffing drac to keep going. She had heard it was better than speed. She assumed she would be immune to it; even as a blood-drinker – like all of her kind, she had turned by drinking vampire blood – she found the idea of dosing her system with another vampire’s powdered blood, diluted with the Devil knew what, disgusting.

  Welles went ahead of her, into the nondescript bungalow, turning on lights as he went. She looked back for a moment at the cast-off nose by the pool.

  Van Helsing’s mad scene?

  She knew the subject of Welles’s current project. He had mentioned to her that had always wanted to make Dracula. Now, it seemed, he was acting on the impulse. It shouldn’t have, but it frightened her a little. She was in two minds about how often that story should be told.

  VI

  Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood in 1939, having negotiated a two-picture deal as producer-director-writer-actor with George Schaefer of RKO Pictures. Drawing on an entourage of colleagues from the New York theatre and radio, he established Mercury Productions as a filmmaking entity. Before embarking on Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Welles developed other properties: Nicholas Blake’s just-published anti-fascist thriller The Smiler with a Knife (1939), Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) and Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Like the Conrad, Dracula was a novel Welles had already done for the Mercury Theatre on the Air radio series (July 11, 1938). A script was prepared (by Welles, Herman Mankiewicz and, uncredited, John Houseman), sets were designed, the film cast, and “tests” – the extent of which have never been revealed – shot, but the project was dropped.