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 thwarted 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 coexisted 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 herse
lf 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.
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 or free.
NANCY A. COLLINS
Some Velvet Morning
Nancy A. Collins, a resident of Atlanta, is the award-winning
author often novels, including Lynch: A Gothik Western and Angels
on Fire, and more than fifty short stories. "Some Velvet Morning" is a
new installment in a cycle of stories about Sonja Blue, a punk
vampire/vampire slayer first introduced in Sunglasses After Dark
(1989), and whose adventures continue in In the Blood (1992), Paint
It Black (1995), and A Dozen Black Roses (1996), as well as in her
own comic-book series. A collected series of Sonja Blue stories has
recently been reissued by White Wolf Publishing in a special
illustrated tenth-anniversary edition.
SHE WAS THE most attractive woman he'd ever seen outside a movie theatre.
She was not just pretty, she was beautiful, and the way models and starlets are
beautiful. Her skin was creamy, as translucent as pearl; her long, wavy hair was the
color of raw honey. Her fire-engine-red lips matched her low-cut one-piece with
spaghetti straps and revealing side slit. She was wearing black-patent-leather opentoed shoes with four-inch heels, which revealed that her toenails, as well as
fingernails, were painted the exact same shade as her lips. And she was smiling at
him from across the hotel bar.
First he had to double-check to make sure there wasn't another, younger man
possibly sitting directly behind him before he dared respond. No. There wasn't
anyone else she could possibly be paying attention to. It had to be him.
"Hey, buddy," he said, pushing a ten across the damp bar top. "I'd like to buy
that lady a drink."
The bartender nodded and palmed the bill without saying a word. A couple of
minutes later a fresh Bloody Mary was placed in front of the woman in red.
She lifted the drink in a half toast and smiled at him. And this time there was no
mistaking it: she was smiling one hundred percent at him.
He nervously slicked back his thinning hair and coughed lightly into his fist,
surreptitiously sniffing it to make sure his breath was passable. Satisfied, he slid
off the barstool and tried to look nonchalant as he strolled to the end of the bar.
"I couldn't help noticing you were alone," he said, trying not to sound nervous.
"Would you mind terribly much if I joined you for a drink?"
"Why should I mind?" she said, flashing yet another one of those smiles.
"After all, you were the one kind enough to buy it for me."
He moved to sit next to her, then stopped and looked around the bar. He was a
thousand miles away from home, his wife, and their friends and associates, but old
habits were hard to break.
"Would you mind if we sat somewhere a little more … private?" he said,
gesturing to a booth in one of the shadowy corners.
"Whatever you like—?" She paused, waiting for him to supply his name.
"John," he said, his cheeks coloring slightly. "My name is John."
"Of course it is," she replied, no hint of irony in her honeyed voice. "My name
is Phaedra."
"That's an unusual name," he said as he slid into the booth beside her.
"It's from the classics. Phaedra was a queen who was possessed by unnatural
desires."
"How fascinating," he said, feigning interest. He suspected Phaedra was as
much her name as John was his. It sounded too deliberate to be real.
Once they were safely in the booth, he went into the same little song and dance
he always did on business trips: he inflated his importance at the firm, while
avoiding telling her the exact company he worked for and what it was he really did
for a living; and when she asked him where he was from, he gave her the correct
state but lied about the city. And some time during the small talk he let his hand fall
on Phaedra's leg just above the knee. To his relief, she did not shift about
uncomfortably or demand that he remove his hand. Her dress was silky smooth
under his palm, and beneath its flimsiness he could feel warm flesh and taut
muscle. It had been years since his wife's thigh had felt like anything besides a bag
of suet.
that his hand slid further up her thigh, towards the heat between her legs. His
suspicions were confirmed: she wasn't wearing panties. He began to sweat, his
scalp itching under his thinning hair. His crotch throbbed like a high -school
freshman with a case of blue balls.
"I, uh, have a room here at the hotel…" he stammered clumsily.
She shook her head and wrinkled her nose in disgust. "I detest hotel rooms.
They're so impersonal. Why don't we go to my place, instead?"
"Sure. Whatever you want, baby."
As he heard himself saying those words, he wondered what the hell he thought
he was doing. He had to catch a flight first thing in the morning, not to mention
turn the rental car back in at the airport. He didn't have the time to waste going to
some hottie's apartment out in the 'burbs. But when he looked into Phaedra's eyes,
he knew he would do whatever it took to get her into bed, even if it meant flying
standby.
As he signed for the drinks, she slid out of the booth and motioned for him to
follow.
"Let's go in my car," she said, holding up a key ring attached to a pair of red
plastic dice.
He knew he should protest. The last thing he needed was to get stranded out in
the middle of nowhere, unable to get back to the hotel in time to pick up his bags
and make his flight home. There was something about the arrangement that set off
an alarm in the back of his head, but it was quickly muffled by the lust rising from
belowdecks.
Phaedra led him out the side door of the hotel bar to the parking lot outside.
She walked ahead of him with quick, purposeful strides, which made her jiggle in
all the right places.
"Here's my car," she said, gesturing to a little convertible, painted the same
color red as her lips and nails. "Hop in, John."
He opened the passenger door halfway, then paused, indecision flickering
across his brow.
"I don't know… maybe I should follow you…"
"You can do that, if you like," she said with a shrug. "I live out on the lake; it's
not that far, but it's easy to get lost if you don't know where you're going."
He suddenly had a vivid mental picture of himself driving around unfamiliar
suburbs in the dark, a raging hard-on in his pants, and with no clear idea of how to
get back to the hotel.
"Okay," he said with a resigned sigh. "I'll ride with you."
He wasn't sure if Phaedra was driving particularly fast, or if merely riding in an
open convertible in the dead of night made it seem that way. The wind tore at him,
turning his tie into a wind sock and exposing his comb-over for the lie it was.
As they sped through the night, she rubbed his thigh gently, moving her hand
closer and closer to his groin. He licked his lips and coughed nervously into his
fist. The lights of the strip malls and main boulevard had long since disappeared,
plunging them into an inky darkness that was relieved only by the glow from the
dashboard and the beams of the headlights on the road ahead.
"Where is it you said you live?" he shouted over the roar of the wind and the
engine.
"Red Velvet manor!" she shouted back.
"Is that some kind of subdivision?"
"Lord, no!" She laughed. "That's what it was called a hundred years ago! It's
something of an unofficial landmark around here. It used to be a brothel for the
superrich. All the rooms had red velvet wallpaper—that's where it got its name.
Now it's a private residence. I live there."
"All by yourself?"
"No."
Before he could ask another question, the car rounded a turn in the road, and
he saw their final destination. It was an impressive late Victorian pile, with turrets
and huge picture windows that glowed like the eyes of a jack-o'-lantern, situated
on a clifflike outcropping that overlooked the lake. Judging from the utter darkness