The two men were debating a potentially thorny moment in the shot, when the camera would be detached from the coach and picked up by an aerial rig. Hanging from the ceiling was a contraption that looked like a Wright Brothers-Georges Méliès collaboration, a man-shaped flying frame with a camera hooked onto it, and a dauntless operator inside.
She hated to think what all this was costing.
Welles saw her, and grinned broadly.
“Gené, Gené,” he welcomed. “You must look at this cunning bit of business. Even if I do say so myself, it’s an absolute stroke of genius. A simple solution to a complex problem. When Midnight comes out, they’ll all wonder how I did it.”
He chuckled.
“Orson,” she said, “we have to talk. I’ve found some things out. As you asked. About Mr Alucard.”
He took that aboard. He must have a thousand and one mammoth and tiny matters to see to, but one more could be accommodated. That was part of his skill as a director, being a master strategist as well as a visionary artist.
She almost hated to tell him.
“Where can we talk in private?” she asked.
“In the coach,” he said, standing aside to let her step up.
XXX
The prop coach, as detailed inside as out, creaked a lot as Welles shifted his weight. She wondered if the springs could take it.
She had laid out the whole thing.
She still didn’t know who John Alucard was, though she supposed him some self-styled last disciple of the King Vampire, but she told Welles what she thought he was up to.
“He doesn’t want a conjurer,” Welles concluded, “but a sorcerer, a magician.”
Geneviève remembered Welles had played Faustus on stage.
“Alucard needs a genius, Orson,” she said, trying to be a comfort.
Welles’ great brows were knit in a frown that made his nose seem like a baby’s button. This was too great a thing to get even his mind around.
He asked the forty-thousand-dollar question: “and do you believe it will work? This conjuring of Dracula?”
She dodged it. “John Alucard does.”
“Of that I have no doubt, no doubt at all,” rumbled Welles. “The colossal conceit of it, the enormity of the conception, boggles belief. All this, after so long, all this can be mine, a real chance to, as the young people so aptly say, do my thing. And it’s part of a Black Mass. A film to raise the Devil Himself. No mere charlatan could devise such a warped, intricate scheme.”
With that, she had to agree.
“If Alucard is wrong, if magic doesn’t work, then there’s no harm in taking his money and making my movie. That would truly be beating the Devil.”
“But if he’s right . . .”
“Then I, Orson Welles, would not merely be Faustus, nor even Prometheus, I would be Pandora, unloosing all the ills of the world to reign anew. I would be the father-in-darkness of a veritable Bright Lucifer.”
“It could be worse. You could be cloning Hitler.”
Welles shook his head.
“And it’s my decision,” he said, wearily. Then he laughed, so loud that the interior of the prop carriage shook as with a thunderbolt from Zeus.
She didn’t envy the genius his choice. After such great beginnings, no artist of the twentieth Century had been thwarted so consistently and so often. Everything he had made, even Kane, was compromised as soon as it left his mind and ventured into the marketplace. Dozens of unfinished or unmade films, unstaged theatrical productions, projects stolen away and botched by lesser talents, often with Welles still around as a cameo player to see the potential squandered. And here, at the end of his career, was the chance to claw everything back, to make good on his promise, to be a Boy Wonder again, to prove at last that he was the King of his World.
And against that, a touch of brimstone. Something she didn’t even necessarily believe.
Great tears emerged from Welles’ clear eyes and trickled into his beard. Tears of laughter.
There was a tap at the coach door.
“All ready on the set now, Mr Welles,” said an assistant.
“This shot, Gené,” said Welles, ruminating, “will be a marvel, one for the books. And it’ll come in under budget. A whole reel, a quarter-of-an-hour, will be in the can by the end of the day. Months of planning, construction, drafting and setting up. Everything I’ve learned about the movies since 1939. It’ll all be there.”
Had she the heart to plead with him to stop?
“Mr Welles,” prompted the assistant.
Suddenly firm, decided, Welles said, “We take the shot.”
XXXI
On the first take, the sliding walls of the Bistritz Inn jammed, after only twenty seconds of exposure. The next take went perfectly, snaking through three stages, with over a hundred performers in addition to the principals and twice that many technicians focusing on fulfilling the vision of one great man. After lunch, at the pleading of Jack Nicholson – who thought he could do better – Welles put the whole show on again. This time, there were wobbles as the flying camera went momentarily out of control, plunging towards the toy forest, before the operator (pilot?) regained balance and completed the stunt with a remarkable save.
Two good takes. The spontaneous chaos might even work for the shot.
Geneviève had spent the day just watching, in awe.
If it came to a choice between a world without this film and a world with Dracula, she didn’t know which way she would vote. Welles, in action, was a much younger man, a charmer and a tyrant, a cheerleader and a patriarch. He was everywhere, flirting in French with Jeanne Moreau, the peasant woman, and hauling ropes with the effects men. Dracula wasn’t in the shot, except as a subjective camera and a shadow-puppet, but John Huston was on stage for every moment, when he could have been in resting his trailer, just amazed by what Welles was doing, a veteran as impressed as parvenus like Spielberg and DePalma, who were taking notes like train-spotters in locomotive heaven.
Still unsure about the outcome of it all, she left without talking to Welles.
Driving up to Malibu, she came down from the excitement.
In a few days, it would be the Julian 1980s. And she should start working to get her licence back. Considering everything, she should angle to get paid by Welles, who must have enough of John Alucard’s money to settle her bill.
When she pulled into Paradise Cove, it was full dark. She took a moment after parking the car to listen to the surf, an eternal sound, pre- and post-human.
She got out of the car and walked towards her trailer. As she fished around in her bag for her keys, she sensed something that made quills of her hair.
As if in slow motion, her trailer exploded.
A burst of flame in the sleeping section, spurted through the shutters, tearing them off their frames, and then a second, larger fireball expanded from the inside as the gas cylinders in the kitchen caught, rending the chromed walls apart, wrecking the integrity of the vessel.
The light hit her a split-second before the noise.
Then the blast lifted her off her feet and threw her back, across the sandy lot.
Everything she owned rained around her in flames.
XXXII
After a single day’s shooting, Orson Welles abandoned The Other Side of Midnight. Between 1981 and his death in 1985, he made no further films and did no more work on such protracted projects as Don Quixote. He made no public statement about the reasons for his walking away from the film, which was abandoned after John Huston, Steven Spielberg and Brian DePalma in succession refused to take over the direction.
Most biographers have interpreted this wilful scuppering of what seemed to be an ideal, indeed impossibly perfect, set-up as a final symptom of the insecure, self-destructive streak that had always co-existed with genius in the heart of Orson Welles. Those closest to him, notably Oja Kodar, have argued vehemently against this interpretation and maintained that there were pressing reasons for Welles’s action
s, albeit reasons which have yet to come to light or even be tentatively suggested.
As for the exposed film, two full reels of one extended shot, it has never been developed and, due to a financing quirk, remains sealed up, inaccessible, in the vaults of a bank in Timisoara, Romania. More than one cineaste has expressed a willingness to part happily with his immortal soul for a single screening of those reels. Until those reels, like Rosebud itself, can be discovered and understood, the mystery of Orson Welles’s last, lost Dracula will remain.
Gates, ibid
XXXIII
“Do you know what’s the funny side of the whole kit and kaboodle?” said Ernest Gorse. “I didn’t even think it would work. Johnny Alucard has big ideas and he is certainly making something of himself on the coast, but this Elvis Lives nonsense is potty. Then again, you never know with the dear old Count. He’s been dead before.”
She was too wrung out to try to get up yet.
Gorse, in a tweed ulster and fisherman’s hat, leaned on her car, scratching the finish with the claws of his left hand. His face was demonized by the firelight.
Everything she owned.
That’s what it had cost her.
“And, who knows, maybe Fatty wasn’t the genius?” suggested Gorse. “Maybe it was Boris Adrian. Alucard backed all those Dracula pictures equally. Perhaps you haven’t thwarted him after all. Perhaps He really is coming back.”
All the fight was out of her. Gorse must be enjoying this.
“You should leave the city, maybe the state,” he said. “There is nothing here for you, old thing. Be thankful we’ve left you the motor. Nice roadboat, by the way, but it’s not a Jag, is it? Consider the long lines, all the chrome, the ostentatious muscle. D’you think the Yanks are trying to prove something? Don’t trouble yourself to answer. It was a rhetorical question.”
She pushed herself up on her knees.
Gorse had a gun. “Paper wraps stone,” he said. “With silver foil.”
She got to her feet, not brushing the sand from her clothes. There was ash in her hair. People had come out of the other trailers, fascinated and horrified. Her trailer was a burning shell.
That annoyed her, gave her a spark.
With a swiftness Gorse couldn’t match, she took his gun away from him. She broke his wrist and tore off his hat too. He was surprised in a heart-dead British sort of way, raising his eyebrows as far as they would go. His quizzical, ironic expression begged to be scraped off his face, but it would just grow back crooked.
“Jolly well done,” he said, going limp. “Really super little move. Didn’t see it coming at all.”
She could have thrown him into the fire, but just gave his gun to one of the on-lookers, the Dude, with instructions that he was to be turned over to the police when they showed up.
“Watch him, he’s a murderer,” she said. Gorse looked hurt. “A common murderer,” she elaborated.
The Dude understood and held the gun properly. People gathered round the shrinking vampire, holding him fast. He was no threat any more: he was cut, wrapped and blunted.
There were sirens. In situations like this, there were always sirens.
She kissed the Dude goodbye, got into the Plymouth, and drove North, away from Hollywood, along the winding coast road, without a look back. She wasn’t sure whether she was lost or free.
2001
Cleopatra Brimstone
Elizabeth Hand
I HAD HOPED THAT by now I had made my point regarding the covers. However, when The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 came out with blobby lettering and what looked like a DayGlo skull on the front, I knew that nobody was listening to my opinions anymore.
The Introduction jumped to eighty-one pages, while the Necrology held at around forty. This still pushed the book to nearly 600 pages. There was only one subject the world was talking about in 2001: what should have been remembered as the year made famous by Arthur C. Clarke’s classic science fiction novel was forever scarred by the terrorist attacks of September 11 on New York’s World Trade Center and Washington’s Pentagon Building.
The world has never been the same since, and I used the editorial comment to look at what effect 9/11 had on the publishing industry and specifically our own genre. As I said at the time: “For the foreseeable future the world has new monsters to fear, new bogeymen to keep us awake at night.” In the intervening years, those very real fears have sadly remained with us and, if anything, grown.
The volume contained a bumper crop of twenty-three stories, with a pair of authors represented by two stories each. However, at the time I was not actually aware of that, as one of them misrepresented themselves to me by submitting their second contribution under a pseudonym. The other was Chico Kidd, who opened and closed the anthology with two swashbuckling adventures featuring a Portuguese sea captain named Luís Da Silva.
Elizabeth Hand has been writing smart and exotic fiction since her first story was published in The Twilight Zone magazine in 1988. Born in America, she splits her time between her home in coastal Maine and London’s Camden Town district, which just happens to be the setting for her International Horror Guild Award-winning story “Cleopatra Brimstone”.
HER EARLIEST MEMORY was of wings. Luminous red and blue, yellow and green and orange; a black so rich it appeared liquid, edible. They moved above her and the sunlight made them glow as though they were themselves made of light, fragments of another, brighter world falling to earth about her crib. Her tiny hands stretched upwards to grasp them but could not: they were too elusive, too radiant, too much of the air.
Could they ever have been real?
For years she thought she must have dreamed them. But one afternoon when she was ten she went into the attic, searching for old clothes to wear to a Halloween party. In a corner beneath a cobwebbed window she found a box of her baby things. Yellow-stained bibs and tiny fuzzy jumpers blued from bleaching, a much-nibbled stuffed dog that she had no memory of whatsoever.
And at the very bottom of the carton, something else. Wings flattened and twisted out of shape, wires bent and strings frayed: a mobile. Six plastic butterflies, colours faded and their wings giving off a musty smell, no longer eidolons of Eden but crude representations of monarch, zebra swallowtail, red admiral, sulphur, an unnaturally elongated hairskipper and Agrias narcissus. Except for the narcissus, all were common New World species that any child might see in a suburban garden. They hung limply from their wires, antennae long since broken off; when she touched one wing it felt cold and stiff as metal.
The afternoon had been overcast, tending to rain. But as she held the mobile to the window, a shaft of sun broke through the darkness to ignite the plastic wings, blood-red, ivy-green, the pure burning yellow of an August field. In that instant it was as though her entire being was burned away, skin hair lips fingers all ash; and nothing remained but the butterflies and her awareness of them, orange and black fluid filling her mouth, the edges of her eyes scored by wings.
As a girl she had always worn glasses. A mild childhood astigmatism worsened when she was thirteen: she started bumping into things, and found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the entomological textbooks and journals that she read voraciously. Growing pains, her mother thought; but after two months, Janie’s clumsiness and concomitant headaches became so severe that her mother admitted that this was perhaps something more serious, and took her to the family physician.
“Janie’s fine,” Dr Gordon announced after peering into her ears and eyes. “She needs to see the ophthalmologist, that’s all. Sometimes our eyes change when we hit puberty.” He gave her mother the name of an eye doctor nearby.
Her mother was relieved, and so was Jane – she had overheard her parents talking the night before her appointment, and the words CAT scan and brain tumour figured in their hushed conversation. Actually, Jane had been more concerned about another odd physical manifestation, one which no one but herself seemed to have noticed. She had started menstruating several mon
ths earlier: nothing unusual in that. Everything she had read about it mentioned the usual things – mood swings, growth spurts, acne, pubic hair.
But nothing was said about eyebrows. Janie first noticed something strange about hers when she got her period for the second time. She had retreated to the bathtub, where she spent a good half-hour reading an article in Nature about Oriental Ladybug swarms. When she finished the article, she got out of the tub, dressed and brushed her teeth, then spent a minute frowning at the mirror.
Something was different about her face. She turned sideways, squinting. Had her chin broken out? No; but something had changed. Her hair colour? Her teeth? She leaned over the sink until she was almost nose-to-nose with her reflection.
That was when she saw that her eyebrows had undergone a growth spurt of their own. At the inner edge of each eyebrow, above the bridge of her nose, three hairs had grown remarkably long. They furled back towards her temple, entwined in a sort of loose braid. She had not noticed them sooner because she seldom looked in a mirror, and also because the odd hairs did not arch above the eyebrows, but instead blended in with them, the way a bittersweet vine twines around a branch. Still, they seemed bizarre enough that she wanted no one, not even her parents, to notice. She found her mother’s eyebrow tweezers, neatly plucked the six hairs and flushed them down the toilet. They did not grow back.
At the optometrist’s, Jane opted for heavy tortoise-shell frames rather than contacts. The optometrist, and her mother, thought she was crazy, but it was a very deliberate choice. Janie was not one of those homely B-movie adolescent girls, driven to science as a last resort. She had always been a tomboy, skinny as a rail, with long slanted violet-blue eyes; a small rosy mouth; long, straight black hair that ran like oil between her fingers; skin so pale it had the periwinkle shimmer of skim milk.
The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror Page 58
