Dracula Lives

by Robert Ryan

  He donned the gloves and goggles.

  “These are essentially integrated computers of my own design, able to process nearly a trillion bits of data per second. Twenty-five years ago you would have needed a central processing unit the size of this room to even approach that capacity. I can use one or both of the gloves, depending on the needs of the scene. The gloves have sensors that can transmit any of my body movements to the creatures. Instead of cells, their millions of digital bits are the receptors. Watch.”

  He pressed the fingertips and thumb of one hand against the fingertips and thumb of the other. Markov and the hound slowly swiveled their heads in unison. “Repetitive movements like walking are easy. I simply program them into the creature, then I activate the program here.” He held a finger poised over a button on the goggles. “Each push makes it go faster, from walking to an all-out run.”

  He pushed the button and the hound began walking. He pushed another button and the hound stopped. Markov sat. The hound sat. Markov looked around, sniffing. The hound did the exact same.

  “You get the idea,” Markov said. He removed the gloves and goggles with the theatrical flair of a lead actor holding for applause at the curtain call. Quinn almost expected him to bow.

  “You make a very convincing hound,” Quinn said.

  “In acting out the parts for my movie, I have had to learn to move—even think—like a dog, or whatever the part calls for. Which, of course, is something it seems I was born to do. I’ve been mimicking actors my whole life.”

  “Impressive,” Quinn said. “Your technology goes far beyond computer animation. Even George Lucas and his team at Skywalker haven’t been able to do this.”

  “It took me years to perfect. I spent enough hours studying the neurosciences to have earned a Ph.D., learning everything there is to know about how the brain functions and how it controls what we do.

  “In the simplest layman’s terms, all activity in the brain translates into electrical, chemical, and magnetic impulses that course through our nervous system and control all of our bodily functions. In essence, I was the transmitter and my digital creation was the receiver. The missing link was how to connect the two so that I could use the energy from my brain to animate the digital creation. My theory was, that if I could somehow harness those brain waves and conduct them into my digital creations, I could bring them to a close approximation of life.”

  “So what did you do?” Quinn asked.

  “The theory was sound, but I reached an impasse. No computer was powerful enough—fast enough—to process the billions of bits of data required for such complex operations. Nanotechnology changed everything. Silicon Valley was getting more and more data onto smaller and smaller chips, increasing their processing speed exponentially. It was clear that this was the quantum leap that would propel the computer revolution into unimaginable realms of possibility. One of the reasons I’m so rich is the investments I made in computers and computer technology from the very beginning. Intel and Microsoft paid for this estate many times over.”

  Markov handed him the gloves and goggles for closer inspection.

  “They’re like a more advanced virtual reality setup,” Quinn said.

  “My goal is to take the ‘virtual’ out of that phrase. I am very close. Too close, perhaps.”

  Quinn’s impatience at one cryptic remark too many slammed head-on into his need to remain diplomatic so that he could get the full story. “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “I sense your frustration with all my veiled references to danger, but it had to be so. Before I could reveal the dark secrets of a very unorthodox life, I needed to assure myself that you were not merely some awestruck fan. I have had to deal with a number of those over the years. Despite the enormous pains I have taken not to be hounded because of my Dracula connection, it seems that in this age of the Internet no secret is safe. Whatever the case, somehow overzealous fans find out, and I am forced to get rid of them. This is why I have been purposely keeping my cards close to the vest.

  “Now that I see the seriousness of your interest, and that your knowledge of horror and filmmaking fits in very well with my situation, I shall start putting those cards on the table. Come. I will turn over the next one in answer to your question, about my perhaps coming too close to creating cinema reality.”

  CHAPTER 10

  When they were seated back at the editing/remastering console, Markov saw Quinn staring at the framed quotation centered beneath the movie posters:

  “My terror is not of Germany. It is of the soul.”

  —Poe—

  Quinn gestured at the quotation. “A line well-known to Poe aficionados. It’s from an essay in which Poe defended himself against charges of ‘Germanism’ in his horror tales.”

  “What I am about to show you gives Poe’s statement a whole new level of meaning,” Markov said. “As a folklorist, you may be familiar with a superstition that developed in the early days of photography: the notion that a photograph permanently captured some of a person’s soul.”

  Quinn nodded. “I researched it extensively when I was studying the influence of movies on real life. The illusion of reality was so shocking in the earliest days of moving pictures that some actors refused to do them, for fear that their soul might forever be trapped in the film.”

  What passed for lightheartedness in Markov’s solemn nature had evaporated. “Quite by accident during the remastering process, I discovered that their fears were not groundless.”

  “You discovered that an actor’s soul is retained in the film?”

  “At least to some degree, yes. The first film I remastered was, of course, Dracula. One night after I turned off the computer, I noticed ghostly images of the actors continuing to move around the screen. I began to explore how this could be. I was very aware of ‘burn-in’—the potential for a digital image left frozen on the screen too long to leave an afterimage of itself. But these were moving images, and they were moving around exactly as the actors had during the scene. No other part of the scene had remained; only the actors. Why? Screen immortality had always fascinated me, the fact that we can watch people long dead still living their lives, laughing, loving, having adventures. Was there more to it than simply images captured on film? Had I discovered a new form of animation? More than that: a way to bring actors back from the dead?

  “So I tried an experiment. I froze a particular scene with Lugosi and Dwight Frye and highlighted them pixel by pixel. I then extracted them from the picture, leaving a blank space where they had been. There was no movement, no afterimage. I pasted the actors onto a blank page in another computer, and turned the computer off.

  “The ghostly images of the actors played out the scene exactly as they had before.”

  The faint hum of the computers in the otherwise silent room conveyed an eerie feeling of soulless life. The drone was so hypnotic that Quinn was mildly startled when Markov went on.

  “I tried to find a way to determine whether this same phenomenon existed in the original film, or if it was some kind of anomaly that only manifested itself in the digitized version. I tried running the film, then stopping it and examining the frames for any sign of continued movement. I did this in light and darkness, through all kinds of filters—infrared, ultraviolet, polarizing. I examined the frames with a microscope, searching for signs of anything unusual within the actors—a glow, a spark, something not visible to the naked eye.

  “There was nothing. Yet somehow, the digitizing process had brought something dormant in the celluloid to life. What? How did the digital recording process differ from film?

  “The answer immediately became clear: magnetism. Digital recording is done on magnetic media—hard drives, thumb drives, disks. And science has long proven that electromagnetism is one of the primal forces that give us life, going back at least to Mesmer’s early 19th-century attempts to manipulate our magnetic aura. Animal magnetism, he called it. His experiments, and the intense scientific study of the pheno
menon at the time, were a major source of inspiration for Mary Shelley in creating Frankenstein’s Monster.”

  Markov’s steady gaze wandered to some troubling inner place before returning with a heightened intensity. Quinn had gotten used to his pauses for effect, but this was not the melodramatic Lugosi stare. For the first time Quinn saw uncertainty. It was only there for an instant before Markov gathered himself and went on.

  “My theory was that the human soul, like all other things, has a molecular structure. Because motion pictures are actually 24 still frames per second creating the illusion of motion, the silver nitrate that captured the original images on film trapped those molecules into permanent stasis within each individual still frame. But digitization eliminated the split-second between each frame to give the lives of the characters a continuous flow. It created reality instead of the 24-frames-per-second illusion of reality. At the same time, the magnetism inherent in that process excited the static molecules of each frame back into life.”

  Whatever was troubling Markov flickered across his expression again. Before, Quinn had read it as uncertainty. Now he thought he saw something else: remorse.

  “I have reached the line you spoke of, Mr. Quinn. The line between movies and real life. The line I have spent my life trying to make disappear.”

  He paused, choosing his words carefully. The glow of the monitors combined with the fluorescent lighting to lend an air of surrealism to the scene.

  “This is where we enter the realm of true horror,” Markov continued. “Magnetism had caused an unforeseen side effect. During my countless hours of remastering, the magnetism of my body had acted as a kind of hard drive, drawing some of those digitized bits into me. I began to notice changes in the mirror. Fleeting resemblances to Lugosi, Karloff, Lon Chaney, Lon Chaney Jr., many others. I was becoming them. I began to feel what they were feeling. Not the actors. Their characters. I would catch glimpses of the Frankenstein Monster, the Wolf Man. Even though I couldn’t see him in the mirror, I could feel Dracula’s growing need for blood.”

  Markov cast a glance at his large remastering monitor. In the few seconds that he stared at the black screen, Quinn wondered if he was looking for his reflection. Or signs of movement. Markov got up and took a few steps until he was directly between Quinn and the Poe quote—an actor taking stage.

  “Rather than being appalled, as any sane person would be, I was thrilled. If I could harness that magnetism, I might somehow become a conduit for the most realistic special effects the world had ever seen.

  “Over a period of weeks I took readings of my personal magnetic field with a magnetometer. It was getting stronger. Even so, the manifestations were still weak and fleeting. Two factors came into play that boosted them to full strength.

  “The first was not intentional. Too many trespassers had forced me to take a drastic step to protect my privacy—and to protect the trespassers from my wrath. I installed several extremely powerful electromagnetic transmitters around my property, creating a kind of force field. Compasses couldn’t find north, and the wave transmission necessary for modern devices would be disrupted—GPS, cell phones, and the like. Johnny or I turn the system off when we need to communicate with the outside world. Since we rarely need to do that, the system is on most of the time. Again I theorize, but I believe that years of those magnetic waves seeping into my body strengthened the magnetism within me, causing the digital bits I have absorbed to stay integrated as a unified entity. In other words, it gave the creatures life.”

  Henry Frankenstein’s mad shout when his creation first shows movement after the bombardment of lightning came into Quinn’s head: “It’s alive!”

  “What was the other factor?” he said.

  “My invention of those gloves and goggles. When I put them on I can become the creatures on the screen.”

  “You mean a digital version of them. Like the Hound of the Baserkvilles.”

  “Yes and no,” Markov said.

  Quinn forced himself to wait for the explanation.

  Markov gestured toward the gloves and goggles. “At first, yes. As soon as I took them off, the image disintegrated into its digital bits. But over time—years—a transformation began to take place. The digital image would disintegrate, but its spirit had clung to me. I was becoming evil incarnate. I was each monster that overtook me. At first the manifestations would last only a few seconds, and only affect part of my body. The face, a hand, a foot. But the more I continued the process, the stronger the mutations became. Not just physically, but psychically. I began to feel what the monsters felt: a thirst for blood, a hunger for vengeance.”

  Again a hint of remorse flickered across his features, but in the space of a breath the stoic mask was back.

  “The scientist in me groped for an explanation. My hypothesis was that, powered by the electrical and magnetic and chemical impulses that continually course through us all, the bits of the characters’ souls that had seeped into me were combining with the molecular structure of my soul. In effect becoming digital recombinant DNA to create a new life form within me. An unthinkable computer virus, if you will, using me as a host to replicate itself.

  “Of course, I could not prove this. No one can. To this day, science does not fully understand the workings of the human psyche. Of these animating forces that give us life. It was moot in any case. I knew I had left the realm of science and entered the realm of nightmare. I also knew that I should stop, that it could lead to no good end.”

  “But you haven’t,” Quinn said.

  “My superego—my conscience—was no match for my id. The ‘mindless primitive,’ as Morbius called it. Home to my uncontrollable urge to prove that I was not just Lucky—the gopher, the mascot. I was George Tilton, genius. Remastered into the greatest horror director the world had never seen. Markov.

  “And so I changed my name and built this house of horrors. Oh yes, there is horror here. Because I still cannot make myself stop, even though the horror continues to get progressively worse.”

  Worse? Quinn’s mind had already been racing to imagine the dangers of a psychotic mimicking the behaviors of movie monsters. What could be worse? “How so?” he asked.

  “I am no longer in complete control of the monsters inside me. Most of the time this virus within me lays dormant. But like any virus, there are triggers.”

  “Such as?” Quinn said.

  “Anger. Stress. The moon.”

  The full moon was tomorrow night. The night Markov was determined to end his movie with a monster rally to end all monster rallies.

  With me in the middle of it, if I decide to stay.

  “Sometimes the mindless primitive takes over completely,” Markov went on, “and I cannot be stayed from committing its atrocities.”

  “Atrocities?”

  “Yes.” A flare of anger burned away the Markov persona long enough to reveal the tortured soul that had been George Tilton, struggling to come to grips with the havoc wreaked not only by monsters he had created, but apparently by monsters that were sometimes him.

  He closed his eyes and took a moment to collect himself. The moment lasted so long Quinn began to think he had fallen asleep or gone into some kind of trance. “Markov?”

  He opened his eyes and spoke with great effort. “There is more to the story. My transformation into something not completely human had begun long before.” He seemed to be pulling the words from some long-unopened vault in his soul. “It is time to reveal my darkest secrets. The ones I keep hidden away in my version of Pandora’s box. Only then can you fully understand how George Tilton became Markov, Maker of Monsters.”

  Something not completely human. Whatever forces had come together to make him describe himself that way, Quinn knew from Markov’s offer to let him leave, and other hints and glimpses he’d gotten, that there might still be enough of George Tilton left to save him. Watching his struggle against whatever abyss his demons were pulling him into, Quinn threw him a lifeline.

  “
In the Pandora myth,” he said, “when she reaches the bottom of her box, she finds Hope.”

  “Ah. I never knew that. Then perhaps there will be a happy ending to my horror story?”

  “As the writer you can make the ending whatever you want it to be. Whatever makes you happy.”

  “That is very much the ending I have planned. I just need to work out the final sequence that will make it a reality.”

  Having seen how intensely Markov believed in the “nightmare factory” he had created, Quinn expected that whatever dark secrets he was about to see would be disturbing. But the compulsion to explore dark secrets was the story of Quinn’s life. In his work searching for the origins of monsters, he’d come to many moments of decision like this, when it was time either to do the sensible thing and turn back, or plunge ahead into almost certain danger. When he’d realized a fundamental truth about himself—that some irresistible urge in his nature made him invariably plunge ahead—he’d developed a mental ritual to lighten the moment, and he engaged in it now:

  Poe’s Imp of the Perverse popped into his head like a demonic jack-in-the-box, goading him into it.

  “Open the lid,” Quinn said. “Let’s get to the bottom of your box and see if we find Hope.”

  Markov moved to stand but stopped when another thought struck him. “Earlier you asked if my castle is a house of dark shadows.”

  “I was being tongue-in-cheek.”

  “Yes, but your observation was dead-on. My house—my life—is a creation of the movies. And movies are, as you well know, light and shadow. The light is those 24 still frames per second that create the illusion of life. The shadow is the spaces between those frames, where there is no life. I have lived my life in those shadows, yearning to be among the living in those 24 frames. For you to fully understand the bizarre path of that life, I must show you the film I have never shown anyone since its ill-fated release. The one that has cast the darkest shadow, from which I have spent my life trying to escape.”