At the Twilight's Last Gleaming (8 page)

“No.”

“And this Dracula business?”

“No.” I’d told them about getting the part of Lucy in the play the previous evening. They seemed mostly pleased that I’d be socializing more, although I suspect they would have preferred a nice Methodist church group.

“Well, that’s good…”

I was a little girl again. “I think I am a little upset about one thing.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I was…..” Should I? Why not, I thought.

“You know the principal?”

“Sure,” said Dad. “He’s been at the PTA events I’ve attended. Good guy.”

“He’s kind of strange.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, he had me come to his office and told me he didn’t like the clothes I wore.”

“Hmmm. Nothing against the dress code, though is it? he asked. And modest?”

“I guess,” I said.

“Still, he’s a straight up guy. A disciplinarian, I suppose. Likes a strict chain of command. Nothing wrong with chain of command.”

“He’s just kind of intimidating. He said I was of leader material, not follower or rebel material.”

“Hmm.” Dad looked thoughtful. “I guess that was a compliment.”

“I didn’t feel like it.”

“Well, tell you what,” he said. “I’ll have a talk with him and see what’s what. I need to get a bit more in the loop of my children’s education anyway.” I could almost see him stroking his chin thoughtfully. “Maybe he plays golf.”

“I think he’s, like, more of a hunter, Dad.”

“Yes, he does seem the hunter type, but golf’s a much better place to talk. Meanwhile, I appreciate your self-expression. But I happen to think you are a very pretty girl and you’d look good in a bit more color.”

I was thinking about future rehearsals. So far all the black garb hadn’t gotten much attention from Peter. So why not add a bit of color, and a maidenly smile?

“You know, maybe your right. But Dad…”

“Yes?”

“Maybe sometime you can talk to him. You know, man to man…”

Dad had big sloping shoulders and a broad face centered with a big nose. But the biggest thing about him, after his heart, was his mouth. It almost seemed to stretch from ear to ear when he smiled. “I don’t know what good that would do, pumpkin.”

“He might lay off me a little, see me less as one of the masses, you know. He wouldn’t think, there’s that rebel woman, he’d think there’s Col. Williams little girl. And maybe he’d be nicer then.”

“Hmm. That’s a possibility, Rebecca. Very well then, yes. That’s just what I’ll do. And I do think there’s a PTA meeting coming up next week, and I’ll be in town then.”

“Oh Dad, that would be super!”

“My little bird,” he hugged me.

“Daddy, did you ever wish we hadn’t left England?”

In the light from my bed lamp his broad brow furrowed. “Why would you say that, pumpkin? We’re back home now. We’re in our own country.”

I shivered. “I don’t know Dad. The Pentagon is just across the Potomac River. We’re right by Congress and the Supreme Court. The other day I heard a dreadful racket and I looked up and there was this great big helicopter whup-whup-whupping toward Andrews Air Force Base — and I think, that’s the White House helicopter carrying President Johnson to Andrews Air Force base, where my father works!”

“That’s right. I’ve seen it myself. Quite a sight through these old elm trees. And I’ve been on Air Force One… Not when the President was there, of course, but…” He cocked his head. “Well, I’m a little alarmed, I must say. I thought that you and your little brother would love it here. You’d learn a lot and benefit from being close to the center of things.”

“Dad, we may be near Washington D.C., the nerve center for the world’s most powerful nation. But we’re in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and I’m going to a school where more than half the students are learning to weld or keep house. We were by Oxford before. I guess I miss it. I think I learned a lot there.”

He grinned. “You learned to be a Beatlemaniac and an oddball. I never should have taken you to see
Beyond the Fringe
.”

“Oh, and the trips to London, yes. We did see a lot of Shakespeare too, you know.”

“Cheeky girl!” he said. “You know, I don’t see why we can’t get you some kind of summer program over there this year! Why not?”

I was at first thrilled at the idea, but then I remembered. Peter. We’d have to see how that went, right?

“Oh yes, let’s do look into it!” I said.

“So, do you think you can go to sleep now, minus nightmares?”

“You’ll be there to beat ‘em all up, Daddy.”

“You are a sweetie. Goodnight, dear.” He reached over to the bed lamp.

“Maybe,” I said, “I’d better keep that on.”

CHAPTER TEN

T
HE VAMPIRE STOOD by the window.

He was very tall, and had I could feel his presence, radiating through the room. His hair was slicked back, and his long cape slowly fell toward the floor, from where it had once hung in the air as wings. Outside the window, the night moved like a living thing, and I heard a wolf’s howl, distant and mournful.

I lay upon the bed, and watched him.

I couldn’t take my eyes off of him.

He was magnificent.

His hair was a long mane of black, beautifully combed, perched atop broad shoulders. His forehead, pale and domed, had a bottom of fierce eyebrows, like black flares. His face was long and elegant — regal, with high cheekbones, and a soft mouth. His eyes blazed with hazel focus, looking at me as if I were the only thing in the world that mattered.

Despite myself, I felt my heart hammering in my chest.

He was big and powerful and beautiful.

Slowly and gracefully he glided over to where I lay on the bed. I could almost feel his body heat as he neared me, but I barely noticed. I could only look at the eyes from where I lay on the bed. They bore into me with a hypnotic fervor, and I felt myself in some kind of fevered trance.

The vampire reached the bed.

He bent.

The cape lifted and draped over me.

I felt something like I’d never felt before. I felt rapture. I felt his strength and his presence, his beauty and his ardor — his need. I felt strength and power in a delirious mixture of earthiness and transcendence.

He smelled like stargazer lilies.

Beneath the cape, he opened his mouth. I held my neck up to accept him — but he had no fangs in his teeth, just a chagrined smile.

“I hope I did that right,” he whispered.

There was a sudden burst of applause.

My spell burst.

I blinked.

“It seemed — uhm — fine,” I said.

Emory Clarke lifted his cape from the bedside, and lifted his knee as well, rising back up to his full six foot four height, out of character and stooping again. He looked a bit sheepish as he smiled out at Mr. Crawley, who was hopping up onto the proscenium and walking toward us.

“Emory, maybe just a little bit faster from the window. I’ll gauge it later with a bigger audience. Otherwise, just perfect. You really have some nice posture, if you try. And Rebecca…”

He looked at me, with an odd look.

“You surprised me.”

“I did?”

“You were spectacular!”

“I was?” I said.

“You had just the right mixture of fright — and something else. Fascination? Yes, something like that. Do you think you can do that again?”

“I’ll try.”

He looked at me with an odd gravity, as though he was reassessing me. I think he thought I was a better actress than he’d thought, since he had mostly picked me for the role because of my English accent. What he couldn’t have known was that I wasn’t acting.

I
had
felt frightened.

I
had
felt fascinated.

And I’d felt a lot more too boot that I hoped hadn’t shown.

Emory Clarke had been a revelation. A revelation in the role of Count Dracula.

I wasn’t the only one who’d been bowled over and shocked by the announcement that Peter Harrigan, the school’s best actor, had selected the meatier character role of Van Helsing instead of the matinee idol role of Dracula. Plenty of jaws had dropped. Emory Clarke, class weirdo — as Dracula? What, had his father had a strange whim that he son should tred the boards? And pulled strings?

But as soon as Mr. Crawley had put a cape on him at the first rehearsal and instructed him to stand up straight and “perform like you did in my office”, jaws dropped even further.

Yes, Emory was tall.

But shaven and without hair falling in his face, he was absolutely majestic. He was handsome, regal — and he had a strong presence.

“Oh yes. When we get some make up on you — that will sock it to the audience!” cooed the English teacher drama coach, echoing the popular phrase from NBC’s
Laugh In
.

Everyone was a bit aghast and all the girls looked at Emory in a different way. The effect hadn’t been lost on me, but I was still focusing on Peter, who was so happy and lost in his practice of his European accent and manners as Van Helsing that he seemed totally oblivious to anything else.

Yes, yes, here I was in close proximity to my target. But if he was so wrapped up in this role he barely paid attention to anyone, how would he notice me?

I’d congratulated him on the role and told him it would be fun working with such a good actor — and he’d just smiled at me condescendingly, as though he was accepting his due, with no regard whatsoever to the individual — and sex — and the individual distributing the praise!

Still, I made every effort to sit as close to him as possible. I wore a lavender perfume — hopefully Victorian style — to get his attention. I chirped laughter happily whenever he made something even close to a joke. I used every possible wile short of baring my breasts to get his attention. Nothing seemed to work very well. He was off in Thespianland, in his own fantasy world of scenery chewing.

“Oh, he’s just drawing on his inner Peter Cushing,” Harry had joked. Peter Cushing, of course, was the best known Van Helsing of the sixties, Edward van Sloan — Bela Lugosi — being pretty forgotten. Peter Cushing was in plenty of Hammer movies, but one Harry was referring to was
Horror of Dracula
with Christopher Lee as the undead Count.

“Well, that performance was very good indeed, don’t you think people?”

Applause pounded.

Hopefully, I looked over to see if Peter had been watching. And there he was, nodding his head and smiling, looking at me in an odd way.

He
had
been watching!

I waited expectantly for my heart to skip a beat.

It just kept on thumping. Elevated rate, yes. But curiously not because of Peter’s attention, but because of the strange experience I’d just had with Dracula. I mean, of course, Emory Clarke.

Still, the notion that Peter had been watching was rather a triumph indeed. But I managed to stuff all these feelings down into myself and soldier on.

There was, after all, more rehearsing to be done.

Rehearsals at this point were just a couple hours after school, every day but Friday. We’d had a read through first rehearsal, and it had been a bit rough. The read through hadn’t happened on stage, but in a classroom. The director had just told us to put our own slant on the characters at first, no pauses for instruction. He said he wanted to get a take on our first impressions of the characters. This, of course, was after we’d had a week or so to read the novel (again, for me) — and then a rehearsal period to watch the original 1931 film of
Dracula
directed by Tod Browning. Throughout, the question remained — unvoiced but lingering in everyone’s minds —

Why Emory Clarke?

From the moment he’d shuffled into the classroom to watch the old spotty print of Dracula splash onto the clunky school screen that had been the question.

Why had Emory Clarke been chosen to play the count?

He looked particularly forlorn and odd on these rehearsal occasions, as his usual companion Cheryl wasn’t with him. I couldn’t bring Harry either. No one but actors and understudies were allowed. Emory tended to just select someplace away from the group, and hunker down with his playbook, flipping quietly through the pages as though burning each and every one into his memory.

Nor did he do anything particular wonderful with his memory.

In the play version, Dracula has many of the best lines, but not as many as the book, and very few in comparison with the rest of the cast. Emory read them without any trace of the famous deep and often-imitated Hungarian accent of Bela Lugosi. Instead, he used his usual Southern drawl. It was odd — but certainly not without its creepiness.

“He’s from the South Carpathians, this Dracula, you see?” Mr. Crawley had quipped, after Emory had said, “Listen, the Children of the Night,” more like a character in a Tennessee Williams play than a supernatural European melodrama.

That had set the tone for the rest of the reading. The mood was fun and a bit exaggerated rather than nervous. In fact, Emory’s reading seemed to give me license to do play a bit with my British accent. I found voicings and vowels and nasalities coming out of me, hitherto unknown.

I’m not sure the acting in that read through was any good, but that didn’t matter. The spirit was there — and it was having a jolly good haunt in that schoolroom.