Anno Dracula (37 page)

As a boy, the mage - Kenneth Anger to mortals of this plane - had appeared as the Prince in the 1935 Max Reinhardt film of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
In later life, he had become a filmmaker, but for himself not the studios (his ‘underground’ trilogy consisted of
Scorpio Rising, Lucifer Rising
and
Dracula Rising),
and achieved a certain notoriety for compiling
Hollywood Babylon,
a collection of scurrilous but not necessarily true stories about the seamy private lives of the glamour gods and goddesses of the screen. A disciple of Aleister Crowley and Adrian Marcato, he was a genuine movie magician.

He was working on a sequel to
Hollywood Babylon,
which had been forthcoming for some years. It was called
Transylvania Babylon,
and contained all the gossip, scandal and lurid factoid speculation that had ever circulated about the elder members of the vampire community. Nine months ago, the manuscript and all his research material had been stolen by minions of a pair of New Orleans-based vampire elders who were the focus of several fascinating, enlightening and perversely amusing chapters. Geneviève had recovered the materials, though the book was still not published as Anger had to negotiate his way through a maze of injunctions and magical threats before he could get the thing in print.

She hesitated on the steps that led down to his slightly sunken
sanctum
. Incense burned before the framed pictures, swirling up to the low stucco ceiling.

‘Do you have to be invited?’ he asked. ‘Enter freely, spirit of dark.’

‘I was just being polite,’ she admitted.

The mage was a little disappointed. He arranged himself on a pile of harem cushions and indicated a patch of Turkish carpet where she might sit.

There was a very old bloodstain on the weave.

‘Don’t mind that,’ he said. ‘It’s from a thirteen-year-old movie extra deflowered by Charlie Chaplin at the very height of the Roaring Twenties.’

She decided not to tell him it wasn’t hymeneal blood (though it was human).

‘I have cast spells of protection, as a precaution. It was respectful of you to warn me this interview might have consequences.’

Over the centuries, Geneviève had grown out of thinking of herself as a supernatural creature, and was always a little surprised to run into people who still saw her that way. It wasn’t that they might not be right, it was just unusual and unfashionable. The world had monsters, but she still didn’t know if there was magic.

‘One man who helped me says his career has been ruined because of it,’ she said, the wound still fresh. ‘Another, who was just my friend, was killed.’

‘My career is beyond ruination,’ said the mage. ‘And death means nothing. As you know, it’s a passing thing. The lead-up, however, can be highly unpleasant, I understand. I think I’d opt to skip that experience, if at all possible.’

She didn’t blame him.

‘I’ve seen some of your films and looked at your writings,’ she said. ‘It seems to me that you believe motion pictures are rituals.’

‘Well put. Yes, all real films are invocations, summonings. Most are made by people who don’t realise that. But I do. When I call a film
Invocation of My Demon Brother,
I mean it exactly as it sounds. It’s not enough to plop a camera in front of a ceremony. Then you only get religious television, God help you. It’s in the lighting, the cutting, the music. Reality must be banished, channels opened to the beyond. At screenings, there are always manifestations. Audiences might not realise on a conscious level what is happening, but they always know. Always. The amount of ectoplasm poured into the auditorium by drag queens at a West Hollywood revival of a Joan Crawford picture would be enough to embody a minor djinn in the shape of the Bitch Goddess, with a turban and razor cheekbones and shoulderpads out to here.’

She found the image appealing, but also frightening.

‘If you were to make a dozen films about, say, the Devil, would the Prince of Darkness appear?’ she asked.

The mage was amused. ‘What an improbable notion! But it has some substance. If you made twelve ordinary films about the Devil, he might seem more real to people, become more of a figure in the culture, get talked about and put on magazine covers. But, let’s face it, the same thing happens if you make one ordinary film about a shark. It’s the thirteenth film that makes the difference, that might work the trick.’

‘That would be your film? The one made by a director who understands the ritual?’

‘Sadly, no. A great tragedy of magick is that to be most effective it must be worked without conscious thought, without intent. To become a master mage, you must pass beyond the mathematics and become a dreamer. My film, of the Devil you say, would be but a tentative summoning, attracting the notice of a spirit of the beyond. Fully to call His Satanic Majesty to Earth would require a work of surpassing genius, mounted by a director with no other intention but to make a wonderful illusion, a von Sternberg or a Frank Borzage. That thirteenth film, a
Shanghai Gesture
or a
History is Made at Night,
would be the perfect ritual. And its goaty hero could leave his cloven hoofprint in the cement outside Grauman’s Chinese.’

Geneviève parked the Plymouth near Bronson Caverns, in sight of the Hollywood Sign, and looked out over Los Angeles, the city transformed by distance into a carpet of Christmas lights. MGM used to boast ‘More stars than there were in the Heavens’, and there they were, twinkling individually, a fallen constellation. Car lights on the freeways were glowing platelets flowing through neon veins. From up here, you couldn’t see the hookers on Hollywood Boulevard, the endless limbo motels and real estate developments, the lost, lonely and desperate. You couldn’t hear the laugh track, or the screams.

It came down to magic. And whether she believed in it.

Clearly, Kenneth Anger did. He had devoted his life to rituals. A great many of them, she had to admit, had worked. And so did John Alucard and Ernest Gorse, vampires who thought themselves magical beings. Dracula had been another of the breed, thanking Satan for eternal night-life.

She just didn’t know.

Maybe she was still undecided because she had never slipped into the blackness of death. Kate Reed, her Victorian friend, had done the proper thing. Kate’s father-in-darkness, Harris, had drunk her blood and given of his own, then let her die and come back, turned. Chandagnac, Geneviève’s mediaeval father-in-darkness, had worked on her for months. She had transformed slowly, coming alive by night, shaking off the warm girl she had been.

In the last century, since Dracula came out of his castle, there had been a lot of work done on the subject. It was no longer possible to disbelieve in vampires. With the
nosferatu
in the open, vampirism had to be incorporated into the prevalent belief systems and this was a scientific age. These days, everyone generally accepted the ‘explanation’ that the condition was a blood-borne mutation, an evolutionary quirk adapting a strain of humankind for survival. But, as geneticists probed ever further, mysteries deepened: vampires retained the DNA pattern they were born with as warm humans, and yet they were
different
creatures. And, despite Max Planck’s Black Blood Refractive Postulate of 1902, the laws of optics still seemed broken by the business with mirrors.

If there were vampires, there could be magic.

And Alucard’s ritual — the mage’s thirteen movies — might work. He could come back, worse than ever.

Dracula.

She looked up from the city-lights to the stars.

Was the Count out there, on some intangible plane, waiting to be summoned? Reinvigorated by a spell in the beyond, thirsting for blood, vengeance, power? What might he have learned in Hell, that he could bring to the Earth?

She hated to think.

She drove through the studio gates shortly before dawn, waved on by the uniformed guard. She was accepted as a part of Orson’s army, somehow granted an invisible arm-band by her association with the genius.

The Miracle Pictures lot was alive again. ‘If it’s a good picture, it’s a Miracle!’ had run the self-mocking, double-edged slogan, all the more apt as the so-called fifth-wheel major declined from mounting Technicolor spectacles like the 1939 version of
The Duelling Cavalier,
with Errol Flynn and Fedora, to financing drive-in dodos like
Machete Maidens of Mora Tau,
with nobody and her uncle. In recent years, the fifty-year-old sound stages had mostly gone unused as Miracle shot their product in the Philippines or Canada. The standing sets seen in so many vintage movies had been torn down to make way for bland office buildings where scripts were ‘developed’ rather than shot. There wasn’t even a studio tour.

Now, it was different.

Orson Welles was in power and legions swarmed at his command, occupying every department, beavering away in the service of his vision. They were everywhere: gaffers, extras, carpenters, managers, accountants, make-up and effects technicians, grips, key grips, boys, best boys, designers, draughtsmen, teamsters, caterers, guards, advisors, actors, writers, planners, plotters, doers, movers, shakers.

Once Welles had said this was the best train-set a boy could have. It was very different from three naked girls in an empty swimming pool.

She found herself on Stage 1, the Transylvanian village set. Faces she recognised were on the crew: Jack Nicholson, tearing through his lines with exaggerated expressions; Oja Kodar, handing down decisions from above; Debbie W. Griffith (in another life, she presumed), behind the craft services table; Dennis Hopper, in a cowboy hat and sunglasses.

The stage was crowded with on-lookers. Among the movie critics and TV reporters were other directors - she spotted Spielberg, DePalma and a shifty Coppola - intent on kibbitzing on the master, demonstrating support for the abused genius or suppressing poisonous envy. Burt Reynolds, Gene Hackman and Jane Fonda were dressed up as villagers, rendered unrecognisable by make-up, so desperate to be in this movie that they were willing to be unbilled extras.

Somewhere up there, in a platform under the roof, sat the big baby. The visionary who would give birth to his Dracula. The unwitting magician who might, this time, conjure more than even he had bargained for.

She scanned the rafters, a hundred feet or more above the studio floor. Riggers crawled like pirates among the lights. Someone abseiled down into the village square.

She was sorry Martin wasn’t here. This was his dream.

A dangerous dream.

A SCRIPT

by Orson Welles

Based on
Dracula
by Bram Stoker

Revised final, January 6, 1981

1. An ominous chord introduces an extreme CU of a crucifix held in a knotted fist. It is sunset, we hear sounds of village life. We see only the midsection of the VILLAGE WOMAN holding the crucifix. She pulls tight the rosary-like string from which the cross hangs, as if it were a strangling cord. A scream is heard off camera, coming from some distance. The Woman whirls around abruptly to the left, in the direction of the sound. Almost at once the camera pans in this direction too, and we follow a line of PEASANT CHILDREN, strung out hand in hand and dancing, towards the INN of the Transylvanian Village of Bistritz. We close on a leaded window and pass through — the set opening up to let in the camera — to find JONATHAN HARKER, a young Englishman with a tigerish smile, in the centre of a tableau Breughel interior, surrounded by peasant activity, children, animals, etc. He is framed by dangling bulbs of garlic, and the Village Woman’s crucifix is echoed by one that hangs on the wall. Everyone, including the animals, is frozen, shocked. The scream is still echoing from the low wooden beams.