He cries out the name of “Laura! Laura!” Jon Finch rushes into the room with Ferdy Mayne, but no sooner has the stethoscope been pressed to her bare chest than the Doctor sees the telltale bite mark, accompanied by a glissando of violins …
“Consider this,” Cushing said. “If I talk to the police, yes, they might think I’m a crazy old man, they might think I’m guilty – that is a matter of supreme indifference to me, I assure you. But because of my so-called fame as an actor, your name will be in the News of the World, too, whether you like it or not. Before long the disreputable hacks will be rooting around in your past, talking to your wife, your past girlfriends, your other – yes, I’ll say it – victims. And if some of them, if only one of them speaks … Sue … Your son … And I think they will. I think they’ll need to … And, irrespective of what happens to me, you’ll be seen for what you are.”
The General’s keening cries echo plaintively through the house, the camera pans across the graveyard of the Karnsteins …
“And Carl’s mother will know exactly what kind of man she is intending to marry.”
A peasant girl walks through the woods. She hears a cry. It’s only a bird, but it spooks her. She runs. The camera pursues her like a predator through the trees. She drops her basket of apples.
“Have you thought about what I’m going to be saying about you?” Gledhill said.
“You’re not listening to me. I don’t care.”
The peasant girl trips, falls – rolls through bracken and thorns – screams, as a woman’s body descends over her …
“Don’t you? What about your name? Your good name. Peter Cushing.” If Gledhill smiled, the man next to him was happy not to see it. “Up there on a thousand posters. Like the one out in the foyer. Your name, Peter Cushing, rolling up at the end of hundreds of movies. Peter Cushing, the name you fought for so long to mean something, turned into dirt. Into scum. A name nobody’ll speak any more, except in revulsion.”
“My name is irrelevant.” The old man did not tremble or take his eyes from the images projected by the beam of light passing over his head. He would not be wounded. He would not be harmed.
Gledhill turned his head to him. “Then what about your wife’s name, dear boy? Because it’s her name too, since you married her. Helen Cushing. Are you going to be happy to see her name dragged through the mud? Because I will. You know I will.”
Cushing tried not to make his tension visible.
The gong sounds for dinner and Ingrid – Carmilla now – and Madeline Smith descend the staircase of George Cole’s home in striking blue and red, Madeline looking coy and slightly embarrassed about what’s just gone on in the bedroom.
“You can’t hurt her and you can’t hurt me,” he said. “It’s impossible. You see, she knows I’m here, and she’s with me, even now.”
“Oh dear …” Gledhill laughed in the cinema dark. “I think you’re going a little bit mad, Peter Cushing. I think all those horror films have made you see horror everywhere.”
The monochrome dream comes again, and this time it is Madeline Smith doing the screaming. Kate O’Mara, the governess, comes in. Another dream of cats. Or a real cat?
“The trouble with this part of the world is they have too many fairy tales.”
“Horror isn’t everywhere,” Cushing said. “But horror is somewhere, every day.”
“You might believe that.”
The man was trying to imply that there would be forces of doubt, powerful forces, to face in the battle ahead. Cushing knew full well there might be – but was undeterred.
“You think you have power. You think you’re all-powerful. But you have no power, because you have to feel powerful by attacking little mites who can’t fight back. You take their souls for one reason and one reason alone – because you can. And now you’re frightened. I can tell. Even in the gloom of this cinema. Good. Excellent.” Cushing smiled. “It’s my job to frighten people. You could say I’ve made a career of it.”
A shadow hand creeps along a wall. The peasant-girl’s mouth opens for a scream but no scream comes. Cut to the exterior of the hovel – then it does. The mother finds her daughter lolling from her bed with two red holes in her neck. Cut to Carmilla – Ingrid Pitt – floating through the graveyard, her voluptuousness under the Carnaby Street negligée …
“Do you want me to suck you off?” Gledhill said.
Cushing could sense his own breathing like a hot whirlwind. Could feel the creaking rise and fall of his chest and hear the beat of his heart, everything about his body telling him to scream, but his brain telling him to remain calm.
“Is that what would make you happy, eh? Or a nice stiff cock up the arse? You look the type. Yeah. Actors. Cravat. Well-dressed. Oh, yeah. I know the type. It’s written all over you. Mate.”
But this actor found, to his great surprise, he could not be offended. The splenetic assault was as ludicrous as it was desperate, and, strangely, it had the opposite effect than the one intended. The very force of the invective meant his enemy was on the ropes, and it made him feel – empowered.
“Are you trying to disgust me?”
“I know I disgust you,” Gledhill snarled. “You think you’re a wise old cunt, I know – but really you just want to fuck someone, or something, just like the rest of the human race. You look down on me from on high, but you’re in the swamp with the rest of us.”
Cushing was astonished that the bad language didn’t hurt him any more. He was quite impervious to it.
“I’ve never judged you,” he said. “My only concern is the boy.”
Then he felt a coldness in the air and something icy and sharp pressed to his right cheek. He had felt Gledhill’s arm snake around his shoulders like that of an eager lover and somehow knew instantly it was the stubby blade of the oyster knife.
“What if I cut off your balls and stuff them in your mouth? Would that shut you up, d’you think? Or is that too much blood? What do you think, even for an ‘X’? Never get that past the fucking censor, would we, dear boy?”
The cold of the knife seemed to spread through Cushing’s body. He felt it in his veins. He felt it numbing him inch by inch but remained still and becalmed. “When did you die?” Not even the slightest quaver in his voice. “In your heart, I mean?”
Madeline Smith and Ingrid Pitt are sitting in the shade because Ingrid finds the sunshine hurts her eyes. They see the peasant-girl’s funeral moving sedately through the woods, the priest intoning the Agnus Dei. Full of rage and sadness, Ingrid hisses that she hates funerals. Madeline says the girl was so young. The village has had so much tragedy lately. Ingrid begs her to hold her. They embrace …
“Look, she needs affection.” Gledhill nodded towards the characters on the screen. “And the young girl is only too happy to give it.”
“The young girl is not herself. She’s infected.” The knife tip dug a “V” in his skin, rasping against the stubble, loud in his ear.
“What if she’s like that deep down in her nature, and the other one has just awakened what she really is? Set her free?”
“That’s probably exactly what a vampire might argue. But no one becomes a monster willingly.” The knife against his cheek did not move, but he felt it tremble.
Both men’s eyes were glued unwillingly to the screen.
That night Madeline begs Ingrid not to leave her room. She never feels tired at night any more, only excited, she says. But so wretched during the day. She hasn’t told anyone. Not everything. She can’t. How the cat comes onto her bed. How she tries to scream as it stretches across her, warm and heavy. How she feels its fur in her mouth …
Both men stared.
Madeline Smith says it’s like the life running out of her, blood being drawn, then she wakes, screaming. Ingrid Pitt unties the girl’s night dress – poor Madeline told by the producer it was for the Japanese version, but there was no Japanese version – and Ingrid pushes her back against the plump pillow. Her mouth is on the young girl’s
throat, then slides down to her young breasts. In close-up, Madeline’s pretty eyes – poor child, Cushing remembered, a virgin, didn’t know what lesbians were – roll wide in simulated rapture …
“How were you bitten? Infected?”
Gledhill pressed the blade harder, making the old man’s head shy away. “Life. Life made me like this.”
Cushing could not be sure whether he detected glee, sarcasm or resignation. “Others need not be hurt. The very ones who—”
“You think I haven’t been hurt?” Gledhill spat through locked teeth. “I’ve been hurt in ways you can’t even fucking imagine.” He wiped spittle from his lips with the back of his free hand.
“That’s what made you what you are.” Cushing tried not to think of the knife any more, or the threats, or the obscenities. “You know that. And you know deep down the boy must suffer, because you suffered.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Who was it?”
“Jesus fucking Christ …”
Gledhill snatched the oyster knife away from the old man’s cheek, tossing it to his other hand and back, then plunging it dagger-like into the soft upholstery of the seat in front of him, tearing it back and forth, ripping the material, then slicing it across. The dramatic surges of the soundtrack seemed to accompany his action, and when he was finished he hunched forward, the oyster knife gripped in both fists between his knees, his forehead resting on the seat in front, his whole body shaking.
“Who?”
“Leave me. Go.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“You can fuck off.”
“I’m quite aware I can.”
“Why don’t you then?”
Peter Cushing prised open the other man’s fingers and gently took the knife from his fingers.
“Who?”
The pale man from the General’s party appears. The cadaverous man in the red-lined cape stands in silhouette in the woods as if bearing witness to Gledhill’s words.
“Someone who made me think I loved him. Someone who twisted me round his little finger.” He sniffed. A mocking musicality came to his voice, lifting it, lightening it: a delusion. “I fell for his charms, you could say.” He seemed fearful the bitterness in his words evoked no sympathy. “I have feelings too. Did have. Till he fucking ripped them out of me. Why the fuck am I telling you this?”
Madeline cries out. The house is in darkness. Kate O’Mara, the governess, runs in.
“I know you won’t listen to me,” Cushing said, “but … confess.”
A wettish snort, not even a snigger, in reply. “Bless me father for I have sinned. You make a good priest.”
“I have done.”
Outside the door the two women look at each other knowingly. Kate goes into Carmilla’s bedroom and turns down the lamp. In darkness Ingrid slips out of her dress. The moonlight outlines her naked form. Kate moves closer.
“All is not lost. Tell the police. Nothing can be worse than the Hell you’re enduring now. Do it. For the sake of your immortal soul.”
“Soul?” Now the sound through Gledhill’s nose was more weary than dismissive. He sat up straight again in the cinema seat and shook his head. “No. No way. I can’t. The boy … What would he think of me?”
“Dear God, man.” Peter Cushing could not disguise his bewilderment. “What do you imagine he thinks of you now?”
The blurry vision of Carmilla enters Madeline’s room. The vampire appears to be comforting her in her sickness. The young girl wonders if she’ll live until her father comes home …
“He loves me,” Gledhill said. “I know he does because he shows it. I never have to force him. He never says no. I never force him, ever.”
The Doctor arrives saying Mr Morton asked him to look in on his daughter. Kate O’Mara tells him Madeline has been ill, but it’s nothing to concern him.
“You know what they do in prison to people like me?”
Garlic flowers. Their antiseptic scent. Village gossip. The Doctor puts a cross round Madeline’s neck.
“Sometimes …” Gledhill struggled to complete the sentence he had in mind.
“Sometimes I …” He failed a second time.
Ingrid returns to the daughter’s room. She sees the garlic flowers and crucifix and backs out fearfully.
The two men sat in silence facing the screen.
The Doctor rides through the woods, against unconvincing back-projection. His horse suddenly shies and he is thrown. Carmilla comes around the edge of the lake towards him. In a flurry of autumn leaves she wrestles with him and sinks her fangs into his neck.
Neither Gledhill nor Cushing spoke. It was almost as though they had come to watch a horror film, and nothing more.
George Cole rides for the Doctor, but runs into a coach carrying not only Peter Cushing but also Douglas Wilmer – somewhat aged by make-up since the decapitation prologue – a man The General says he has travelled miles to find. To George Cole’s horror the dead body of the Doctor is on the back of the vehicle. Peter Cushing says: “Now I can tell you, and leave us if you wish. Our destination is Karnstein castle.”
“What do you want me to do?” Gledhill said.
The great chords crash. The coach pulls up at their destination. Douglas Wilmer holds a lamp aloft.
“Primarily I don’t want anything to hurt the boy further, in any way. Bringing in the police and the courts will most surely do that. Horribly. But I shall do that if you leave me no alternative.”
“What do you want me to do?” Gledhill repeated.
Cushing said what had been in his heart all along, and begged that some sliver of humanity inside the man still might grasp the simplicity of it:
“Do what is right and good, for once.”
“Good?”
Said more in genuine puzzlement than disdain.
“Vampires are intelligent beings, General. They know when the forces of good are arrayed against them.”
“Save yourself, in the only way you can. Disappear. Turn to dust.”
Carmilla is dragging Madeline down the stairs. She needs to take her with her. Kate O’Mara pleads with Ingrid Pitt to take her too. Ingrid sinks her teeth in Kate’s neck. Madeline screams. Jon Finch leaps off his horse and bursts in. Ingrid sweeps his sword out of his hand and grabs him, but he grabs a dagger tucked in his boot and holds it up in the shape of a cross. Ingrid backs away from it. He throws the knife. It passes right through her. Double exposure. She fades and is gone.
In the Karnstein graveyard the vampire hunters see the figure of Carmilla entering the ruins. They follow, led by Douglas Wilmer’s lantern. The long cobwebby table is a nod to the first Hammer Dracula, perhaps. One of them finds a necklace on the floor. Peter Cushing looks up. They’ve found the vampire’s resting place.
They lift the stone slab from the floor. Peter Cushing and George Cole carry the coffin into the chapel. Wearing black gloves, Peter Cushing rolls back the shroud. “I will do it.” He takes off the gloves. George Cole kneels at the altar and prays. Peter Cushing takes the stake. Raises it in both hands. Thrusts it down into and through her chest. Back at the house, her victim cries out. Ingrid Pitt’s eyes flash open, then close, as blood pools on her chest. It is over. But not over.
Peter Cushing says, “There’s no other way.”
He draws his sword. With it firmly in one hand, he lifts Ingrid Pitt up by the hair in her coffin. Cuts off her head in one swipe.
As George Cole utters a heartfelt prayer that their country is rid of such devils, Peter Cushing’s General lowers the severed head into the coffin. And Carmilla’s portrait on the castle wall, young and beautiful as she was long ago – in life – turns slowly to that of a decomposed and rotting skull.
Cushing turned his head and found the seat next to him empty.
As the cast list rolled up the screen, he stood and looked around an auditorium lit only by the spill from the projector beam. He shielded his eyes with the flat of his hand but it was clear nobody was pres
ent but himself.
He was still standing facing the small, square window of the projection room when the house lights faded up. He found himself even more clearly in a sea of empty seats. The smell of popcorn and Kia-Ora returned. This time he found it almost pleasant.
He walked into the sunlit foyer with one arm in his coat sleeve. A number of young couples were queuing for tickets for the next performance. One person noticed him and smiled. He raised a hand, not too ostentatiously, not wanting to draw attention to himself, then criss-crossed his scarf on his chest and dragged on the rest of his coat. Another few people arrived. Quite a healthy gathering for an early evening showing. He was pleased, in a subdued way, as if one of his children had done well at school, with little help from himself. The film was a hit, and as long as the public liked it, he wished it well.
He let the heavy door shut behind him. Even more than usually when he had seen a film in the afternoon, the sunlight came as a shock. It almost blinded him, but he was grateful for the warmth on his skin. He raised his chin and stood with his eyes closed for several minutes, and when he opened them, found it noticeably strange that there was not a single gull in the sky.
Ten minutes later he committed the oyster knife to the sea with a throw worthy of a fielder at the Oval.
When he arrived home at 3 Seaway Cottages he felt Helen’s smile in the air immediately, like the most delicate and distinctive fragrance.
“Look.” He lifted his hand up in front of his face. “I’m still shaking.”
You were wonderful.
“Nonsense.”
You are wonderful, Peter.
He felt a strange fluttering at the back of his throat and looked at the door to the living room but didn’t open it.
“So are you, my love.”
Suddenly he found he was ravenously hungry for the first time in he didn’t know when.
In the kitchen he took two slices of bread and cooked cheese on toast under the grille, served with a generous dollop of HP sauce. His appetite undiminished, he made two more rounds, slightly burned, just the way he liked it.
Best New Horror, Volume 25 Page 50