Stephen Volk - Whitstable

“You obviously know me better than I know myself.”

“We shall see if I do.”

“Shall we?” Mocking even his language now.

Peter Cushing’s niece moans Mircalla’s name in her delirium. He holds her hand. When Mircalla is discovered not in her room, he barks angrily at the maid to find her. Ingrid Pitt glides in, non-plussed, saying she couldn’t sleep and went to the chapel to pray. She tells him bluntly—cruelly—that his niece is dead.

Cushing blew smoke and watched the horror ravaging his own face on celluloid, vividly reliving playing the scene, having to play it by imagining the devastating loss of one you love, and hating himself afterwards for doing so.

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 tell-tale 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 round 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 round 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.”