The Other Side of Midnight

by Kim Newman

  mina (proud): A carriage is meeting us here, at midnight. A nobleman’s.

  merchants: Whose carriage?

  Jonathan: Count Dracula’s.

  Jonathan, who knows the effect it will have, says the name with defiance and mad eyes. The merchant is terror-struck, and zita hisses like a cat, shrinking against him. The harkers, and the camera, get out of the coach, which hurries off, the coachman whipping the horses to make a quick getaway. We are alone in a mountain pass, high above the Carpathians. Night sounds: wolves, the wind, bats. The full moon seems for a moment to have eyes, dracula’s hooded eyes.

  Jonathan (pointing): You can see the castle.

  mina: It looks so… desolate, lonely.

  Jonathan: No wonder the Count wants to move to London. He must be raging with cabin fever, probably ready to tear his family apart and chew their bones. Like Sawney Beane.

  mina: The Count has a family?

  Jonathan (delighted): Three wives. Like a Sultan. Imagine how that’ll go down in Piccadilly.

  Silently, with no hoof or wheel sounds, a carriage appears, the driver a black, faceless shape. The harkers climb in, but this time the camera rises to the top of the coach, where the driver has vanished. We hover as the carriage moves off, a large bat flapping purposefully over the lead horses, and trundles along a narrow, vertiginous mountain road towards the castle. We swoop ahead of the carriage, becoming the eyes of the bat, and take a flying detour from the road, allowing us a false perspective view of the miniature landscape to either side of the full-side road and carriage, passing beyond the thick rows of pines to a whited scrape in the hillside that the harkers do not see, an apparent chalk quarry which we realise consists of a strew of complete human skeletons, in agonized postures, skulls and rib cages broken, the remains of thousands and thousands of murdered men, women, children, and babies. Here and there, skeletons of armoured horses and creatures between wolf or lion and man. This gruesome landscape passes under us, and we close on castle Dracula, a miniature constructed to allow our nimble camera to close on the highest tower and pass down a stone spiral stairway that affords covert access to the next stage…

  … and the resting chamber of Dracula and his brides. We stalk through a curtain of cobweb, which parts unharmed, and observe as the three shroud-clad brides rise from their boxes, flitting about before us.

  Two are dark and feral, one is blonde and waiflike. We have become Dracula and stalk through the corridors of his castle, brass-bound oaken doors opening before us. Footsteps do not echo, and we pass mirrors that reveal nothing-reversed sets under glass, so as not to catch our crew-but a spindle-fingered, almost animate shadow is cast, impossibly long arms reaching out, pointed head with bat-flared ears momentarily sharp against a tapestry. We move faster and faster through the castle, coming out into the great hallway at the very top of a wide staircase.

  Very small, at the bottom of the steps, stand Jonathan and mina, beside their luggage. Sedately, we fix on them and move downwards, our cloaked shadow contracting. As we near the couple, we see their faces: Jonathan awestruck, almost in love at first sight, ready to become our slave; mina horrified, afraid for her husband, but almost on the point of pity. The music, which has passed from lusty human strings to ethereal theremin themes, swells, conveying the ancient, corrupt, magical soul of Dracula. We pause on the steps, six feet above the harkers, then leap forwards as mina holds up the crucifix, whose blinding light fills the frame. The music climaxes, a sacred choral theme battling the eerie theremin.

  2: CU on the ancient face, points of red in the eyes, hair, and moustaches shocks of pure white, pulling back to show the whole stick-thin frame wrapped in unrelieved black.

  the count: I… am… Dracula.

  Welles had rewritten the first scenes-the first shot-of the film to make full use of a new gadget called a Louma crane, which gave the camera enormous mobility and suppleness. Combined with breakaway sets and dark passages between stages, the device meant that he could open The Other Side of Midnight with a single tracking shot longer and more elaborate than the one he had pulled off in Touch of Evil.

  Geneviève found Welles and his cinematographer on the road to Borgo Pass, a full-size mock-up dirt track complete with wheel ruts and milestones. The night-black carriage, as yet not equipped with a team of horses, stood on its marks, the crest of Dracula on its polished doors. To either side were forests, the nearest trees half life-size, and those beyond getting smaller and smaller as they stretched out to the studio backdrop of a Carpathian night. Up ahead was Dracula’s castle, a nine-foot-tall edifice, currently being sprayed by a technician who looked like a colossal man, griming and fogging the battlements.

  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.

  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 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’s 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 thwar
ted 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’s 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. Gene,” 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.”

  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 more than a hundred performers in addition to the principles 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 resting in his trailer, just amazed by what Welles was doing, a veteran as impressed as parvenus like Spielberg and DePalma, who were taking notes like trainspotters 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 license 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 posthuman.

  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.

  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 willful scuppering of what seemed to be an ideal, indeed impossibly perfect, setup 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 actions, 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.

  “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 demonised by the firelight.

  Everything she owned.

  That’s what it had cost her.

  “And, who knows, maybe Orson 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 onlookers, 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 good-bye, 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 o
r free.