After the meal, the youth hauled out from under the stage a pair of large chests filled with all manner of costumes. There were heavily embroidered robes suitable for playing a Medieval king or queen mixed in beside tuxedos and evening gowns, Roman togas next to priestly vestments, uniforms of the officers of centuries of armies tangled with the rags of the peasants their forces had terrorized. The young man invited each of the actors to choose clothing expressing who they truly were, revealing their identity, instead of concealing it. This was the opposite of a theatrical troupe’s typical practice, but they had drunk enough of the strong wine to go along with the request. Lugosi chose a tuxedo surprisingly near his size and joined his fellows in changing into the new clothes right there, the wine’s potency having lowered the inhibitions of women and men alike.
(And it occurs to me, this detail echoes the discussion of the husband’s clothing in “Stop Making Sense.” Which is odd, right?)
Perhaps because of the alcohol’s effects, the day lurched ahead in fits and starts. One moment, Lugosi was adjusting his jacket, the next he and the other actors were standing around the stage at the points of a strange geometric design whose outline, he saw, was drawn by the stains on the rock. Each member of the troupe was reciting a short phrase in Latin, no two of them the same. Lugosi’s was, “Lucio non uro,” I shine but do not burn—which of course the lone youth had taught him—just as he had positioned Lugosi at this spot—though he less remembered these details than inferred them. The sun dipped behind the mountains, splashing scarlet light across the clouds overhead.
Time stuttered and the darkness of night was split by the flashing lights coming from a quartet of magic lanterns mounted on slender poles at the corners of the stage. Lugosi couldn’t decipher the figures perforating the cover of the lantern closest to him. Sometimes they appeared to be strange sea monsters, other times they resembled characters in a language he didn’t know. Where the lights overlapped in the center of the stage, they played over an enormous, naked man seated on a great throne. The lanterns’ projections raced across his muscles, seeming to enact a weird dance with one another on his flesh. His long hair was thick and black, as was his beard. He was wearing a crude metal crown whose irregular points shone in the lights.
Despite the man’s inescapable presence, Lugosi had the oddest impression. The man, he said, was not in fact there: he and his throne were in some way creations of the very lights and images flickering over them. Now Lugosi noticed amidst the members of the troupe other forms, which he took for statues, gray shapes whose elegant clothing was pitted and pocked, as if from long successions of rain and snow, of sun and ice. He couldn’t recall where they had come from, or for that matter, the giant of a man he called the Patriarch. His mouth was dry, his tongue rancid with the foul aftertaste of the wine, his lips chapped, but he was still reciting his bit of Latin, “Lucio non uro.” He was terribly thirsty. He thought that the statue to his right, of a middle-aged woman clothed in the regal dress of centuries passed, moved, but he was uncertain. It might have been an effect of the dancing lights, which played tricks on his eyes, giving him the sensation he and everything around him, the other actors, the statues, the stage and its naked monarch, had entered another place, a great black emptiness populated by creatures of fluttering light, projections from across an incredible distance.
Momentarily, the night lurched to a scene Lugosi hinted at, but either would not or could not describe to Wood. The most he would say was that the Patriarch descended from his throne and the statues learned to move.
Then the sky was showing the first hints of dawn. The stage was empty of the giant, his chair, and the magic lanterns. A third of the troupe were gone, along with the gray statues. Lugosi was mumbling “Lucio non uro” through blistered lips. Something weighted his right hand. He opened it, and saw the ring a woman he had thought a statue—or the statue pretending to be a woman—had pressed into his palm seconds before the magic lanterns ceased spinning. Lugosi held on to the ring as he and the remaining actors departed the amphitheater whose stone floor had accumulated a fresh layer of stains. This was pretty much the end for the acting troupe. None of them could talk about what they had been through in the mountains. Lugosi kept the ring with him through the years to come, as he served in the First World War, returned to acting, moved to Hollywood, started acting in the movies that would bring him fame. In time, he told Curt Siodmak about the ring, though he didn’t mention his experience at the monastery. Siodmak asked Lugosi to share the design with Vera West, the costume designer for House of Frankenstein, and this Lugosi did, though he kept the original safely locked away. Wearing it too often or too long, he said, produced unpleasant results. He wouldn’t specify what these were, despite Wood’s pleading, but he said the injections he administered to himself were necessary to deal with his prolonged exposure to the ring, to its temptations.
Hell of a footnote, right? Difficult to believe that Kostova didn’t run across some version of this story while she was writing The Historian. Also difficult to believe Lugosi wasn’t out of his mind on heroin when he told it to Wood.
The second footnote is an equally lengthy and detailed discussion of the connections between the story Lugosi related to Wood and your favorite movie, Ardor. Anders Limoge, who wrote the script, hung around with Ed Wood in the mid-sixties and stayed in touch with him into the seventies, when Wood moved into porn, so it’s conceivable Wood could have passed on Lugosi’s story to him. Rhodes makes a pretty compelling case for its influence on the blood orgy sequence in particular, as well as on the film’s portrayal of Dracula as this naked giant who hangs out on his throne. I’d forgotten there’s a Dracula Ring in Ardor, too, albeit a cock ring. Still…
Don’t know how much if any of this will be of use to you, but I find it fascinating. I really need to get back to my own writing, but it seems the more I learn, the more I want to learn, the more information I want to collect to feed to you. (Now there’s a disturbing image.) Or, what was it you said before, about the research giving the ring more weight? Maybe this is what’s going on. It’s like I’m some kind of knock-off Renfield to your off-brand Dracula. Heh, as you would say.
from: Gaetan Cornichon
to: Michael Harket
date: January 7, 2019 10:14 PM
subject: The Dracula Ring Part 2
You as Renfield to my Dracula. Sure, why not? You’d make a fine assistant. (Assistant? Henchman? Slave? Do we have to put names on these things, as long as you do what I tell you to?)
from: Michael Harket
to: Gaetan Cornichon
date: January 12, 2019 5:30 AM
subject: From the Department of Strange Occurrences
I wanted to have another look at “Stop Making Sense,” but when I went to pull it up on my computer, I could not find it. No trace of it, nada. I thought I might have deleted it by mistake, but it wasn’t in my trash bin, either. I checked my school e-mail in case you’d sent it there, but nope, nothing. I’ve been in that kind of feverish state where everything seems just the slightest bit off, and I had the strangest sensation of not having read the story at all, of having invented the whole thing, or that I’d somehow watched it play out, as if you’d beamed it directly into my brain.
from: Gaetan Cornichon
to: Michael Harket
date: January 12, 2019 11:50 PM
subject: Newer Story (But Maybe It’s All the Same One)
Huh. Weird. Don’t worry about that thing. Try this. It’s the latest the ring and I have come up with.
THE SHARK APPROACHES
“Little shark,” his father used to call him, when Dean was a kid and they’d go to the beach, usually one somewhere along the Bay’s great sweep, Sagamore down beside the Cape Cod canal, or Duck Harbor way out in Wellfleet, and he and Dad would hotfoot it over the burning sand to where the waves broke in
frothing sheets of water which spread up the beach to meet the two of them, their welcome coolness climbing Dean’s shins as he splashed into them, the next line dashing against his knees, his father already a handful of steps behind, slower despite his ridiculously long legs, calling for Dean to wait up, but the wave after rose unexpectedly high, crashing against his belly and holy-shit-was-that-cold his balls, and since the worst was over he might as well dive in, so he put his hands palms together as if he were praying and leapt at the following wave, the ocean taking him into its salt embrace as he kicked his feet and swept his arms, pushing against the motion trying to return him to shore, the steady roar muffled on this side of it, sunlight filtering brightly through the heaving water, schools of tiny fish flitting across the scalloped sand below him, his shadow rippling over them. He would emerge into the air fifty feet from where he’d plunged under the waves, his dad standing scanning the water, trying to locate him, and the minute Dad’s eyes locked on him, the anxiety threatening to overtake his face would dissolve, swept away by his relieved grin, and he’d call out, “Little shark! Wait for me!” And Dean would shout back, “Come on, big shark!”
He knew at the time his father’s nickname for him connected to the movie Jaws, which Grandpa and Grandma had taken Dad and Aunt Kristin to see at the drive-in when he was very young, and which Dad said was one of the scariest things he’d ever seen, maybe the scariest, so frightening it kept him away from the water, even his friends’ pools, for the rest of the summer. (At Dean’s insistence, his father had recited a bare-bones summary of the plot, most of which hadn’t sounded particularly frightening, except the bit about the shark flinging itself half out of the ocean onto the old fisherman’s boat and him sliding down into its waiting mouth: something about the way Dad described the scene—maybe it was the blank expression on the shark’s face, its empty black eyes—made it the source of a few nightmares, much to Mom’s irritation.) The thing was, even as the film was scaring him and all his classmates off the beach, it was awakening a fascination with sharks, fostered by a flood of coloring, activity, and informational books rushed into print by publishers eager to take advantage of the interest of those housebound kids. As a result, Dad was a font of useless information about sharks, much of which he passed on to Dean, who remembered more of it than he thought necessary to enjoy a happy and productive life. Sharks were closer to rays and skates than they were to actual fish with their bony skeletons. A shark’s interior structure was provided by cartilage, the same stuff the tip of your nose was built from; the lightness of the cartilage helped them to float, as did their livers, which were full of buoyant oil. Some sharks couldn’t draw water into their gills on their own; instead, they had to maintain constant motion, forcing water through the gills. If these stopped moving for any length of time, they died, suffocated. Depending on their diet, their teeth varied, but those of the Great White, the shark in Jaws, were triangles, serrated like the carving knife Dad brought out for Sunday roast beef. The same shark could smell a single drop of blood in a million drops of water, and the slim, mucous-filled channels lining its body helped it detect motion across great distances. Mature Great Whites grew to eleven feet if they were male, fifteen if female, but twenty-plus feet was not out of the question. Should a Great White attack you, you were almost certainly dead, unless you could find a way to strike it in the gills, which might drive it off.
And so on. For a few years in his early teens, when it was Shark Week on the Discovery Channel he, Dad, and Judy would gather in front of the living room TV each night to watch two-hour blocks of divers in cages being eyed by enormous sharks sliding alongside the bars, divers floating unprotected amidst schools of smaller (but no less dangerous) sharks circling them, and recitations of shark attacks combining video recreations of the events leading up to the bites with black-and-white photos of the actual wounds.
Eventually, Shark Week’s allure faded, and while Dean remained a fan of Jaws, which he finally watched when he was twelve, the movie and two sequels he sat through had little lasting impact on him. At the beach, Dad continued to call him “little shark,” but since Dean was approaching the same height and weight as his father, the name had the quality of a dad joke. Long before he took his Introduction to Psychology class second term of his junior year, Dean recognized a degree of ambiguity in his father nicknaming him for the creature so terrifying to his childhood self, but couldn’t figure out its significance. Was it Dad’s way of expressing some kind of fear about Dean? But why should he be afraid of his son? Unless it was the anxiety of beholding someone who was going to outlive him: that made sense. Or was the name mocking, comparing him to an animal next to which he was harmless, ineffectual?
It’s funny: he hasn’t devoted this much attention to sharks for years. “Little shark” hasn’t registered as much more than a kind of verbal beach furniture, a way Dad refers to him when they’re at the shore. If he can’t stop thinking about the name and the creature now, it’s because of what he saw when Dad took him into the black wall, into those endless black depths, a huge, pale shark swimming through the inky air toward the two of them.
At least, he thinks it’s what he saw. He’s been confused about a lot of things since—
(the blood)
—actually, since before the black wall, since the night on the living room couch the time he was sick. He had been running a pretty high fever, and everything had the weird, wavery feel it did when the numbers on the digital thermometer showed over 101. His mind was restless, unfocused, slipping from menacing dreams to strange waking and back again, or maybe it was vice versa, he couldn’t say. He was supposed to be playing Outlast, using the game’s graphics and narrative to distract him from his sickness, but the fever made the forms moving on the TV disturbingly real, liable to step out of the large screen and onto the throw rug in front of it at any minute, while the game’s story was hopelessly snarled. Eventually, after yet another stumble to the bathroom, which confirmed nothing left in his system, he fell into a light sleep.
Somewhere behind his eyelids, he was aware of someone entering the living room, a presence as much an absence (whatever the fuck that meant), which registered in his unconscious as a tall, slender shape from whose neck a ragged length of shadow fluttered. The figure bent toward him, allowing Dean to see its face was a great hole, a cavern of blackened flesh studded with stained fangs. The thing pressed its empty face to his neck, the sensation of its rotted flesh against his skin awful. His fever flared, his pulse pounded in his throat. His arms, his legs, his chest were hollow, balloons he couldn’t move. In a dozen places, the fangs dug into his neck. Blood sprayed into its hollow face, streamed down Dean’s flesh to the couch. Pain which should have ejected him from this dream only bound it to him. He was rushing out of his body along with his blood, carried from himself through the tears in his throat, his (un)conscious dissolving into darkness—
—and he was awake, or in a state approaching it, his father rising from where he’d been leaning over him, his mother surveying the two of them from the other side of the couch, her face contorted in an expression Dean didn’t recognize (but later realized was horror). He heard Dad say, “Just checking on him,” an explanation which had to be true, since Dean could feel the skin of his neck whole and uninjured (though the memory of the dream remained vivid, as if he were recalling an actual event, not the by-product of a virus). Mom was less than convinced, her features shifting to wary disbelief. When she pressed her fingers to Dean’s throat, it was as if she’d shared in his dream, which so surprised him, he almost jumped from the couch. He couldn’t escape from his half-waking state, however, and he remained where he was until she departed the room. Finally able to move again, he pushed himself off the couch and staggered into the bathroom on legs stubbornly numb. He flipped up the light switch, and for an instant saw something wrapped around his neck, a tattered length of blackness shining with blood. In the time it took his hear
t to leap in his chest, the scarf was gone, a scrap of dream escaped back to his unconscious. He inspected his throat, but found no evidence of even the slightest injury.
Since that night, his life has continued: he’s gone to school, spent time with his girlfriend, played basketball, binged a couple of Netflix series. But on some level he’s aware of but cannot name, it’s as if nothing has occurred in the intervening weeks. It’s as if he’s remained in front of the mirror, looking at the black scarf wound around his neck. Under normal circumstances, he would have confided in Kara, his girlfriend, but some impulse, some internal censor, has prevented him from telling her anything beyond he’s been really sick and had these insane nightmares, whose details she thankfully hasn’t pressed him for. Nor has he been able to speak to his other friends, with whom he’s shared all manner of things his parents will never know about. Maybe it’s because this involves his dad and mom? He’s wanted to talk to his mother about it, but the words to start such a conversation have proven elusive. For the first time in a while, Dean has wished she would just talk to him, corner him the way she used to when he was a kid and she decided they needed to have a conversation about sex, or drugs, or whatever. Mom, however, has been increasingly preoccupied, with what exactly Dean isn’t sure, although the looks she gives Dad when she thinks no one’s watching her are full of worry. Dean’s made a couple of halting attempts to speak to his younger sister, to ask Judy if she’s noticed anything different about him, but she’s shrugged off his question in favor of what’s on her headphones. As for talking to Dad, well, wouldn’t that be an awkward conversation? “How come I dreamed your face turned into a mouth and you tore out my throat?” Not to mention, his dad has been acting weirder and weirder—another reason for Mom’s secret glances—everything he does, from walking the dog to eating dinner to washing the dishes, accented by a manic humor always on the verge of tipping into out-and-out hysteria.
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