Anno Dracula (57 page)

CHARLES looks at DRACULA’s face. It seems painted on water; sometimes frozen into hard-planed ice, but for the most part in motion. CHARLES sees other faces beneath. The red eyes and wolf teeth are fixed, but around them, under the rough cheeks, is a constantly shifting shape; sometimes a hairy, wet snout, sometimes a thin, polished skull.

DRACULA (grins ferociously)

You have served us well and faithfully, my subjects. Have they not, Vicky?

DRACULA stretches out a hand and caresses VICTORIA’s tangled hair. She shrinks. At the base of the throne-dais cluster a knot of shrouded
nosferatu
women, DRACULA’s BRIDES. They hiss and lust like cats. VICTORIA is plainly in terror of them. DRACULA’s enormous fingers encircle her fragile skull.

DRACULA

Geneviève Dieudonné, I have had word of you before. My lady, why have you not come before to my court? You wandered from one place to the next for hundreds of years, in fear of the jealous warm. Like all un-dead, you were outcast. Was this not injustice? Harried by inferiors, we were denied the succour of church and the protection of law. You and I, we have both lost those that we have loved, to peasants with sharpened spikes and silver sickles. I am named Tepes, the impaler, and yet it was not Dracula who pierced the heart of Lucy Westenra. My dark kiss brings life, eternal and sweet; it is the silver knives that bring cold death, empty and endless. The dark nights are ended and we are raised to our rightful estate. This have I done for the good of all who are
nosferatu
. None need hide his nature among the warm, none need suffer the brain fever of the red thirst. Daughter-in-darkness of Chandagnac, you share in this; and yet you have no love for Dracula. Is this not sad? Is this not the attitude of a shallow and ungrateful woman? Were you not alone, Geneviève Dieudonné? And are you not among friends now? Among equals?

GENEVIEVE

I have been un-dead a half-century longer than you. When I turned, you were a babe in arms. Impaler, I have no equal.

DRACULA glares enormously at GENEVIEVE.

CHARLES (steps forward, hand inside his coat)

I have a gift, a souvenir of our exploit in the East End.

CHARLES takes a cloth bundle from his inside pocket, and unwraps
it. Silver light explodes. Vampires who have been noisily suckling in the shadows are suddenly quiet. The tiny blade gleams, illuminating the whole room. CARPATHIANS, led by HENTZAU, detach themselves from their amusements and form a half circle to one side. Several of the harem of BRIDES stand, red mouths wet and eager.

DRACULA (angrily amused)

You think to defy me with this little needle, Englishman?

CHARLES

It is a gift. But not for you. For my Queen.

He tosses the knife. Tumbling silver reflects in DRACULA’s eyes. VICTORIA snatches the scalpel from the air.

VICTORIA

The Lord forgive me.

VICTORIA slips the blade under her breast, puncturing her heart. For her, it is over swiftly. With a moan of joy, she falls from the dais, rolls down the steps, chain unravelling. RUTHVEN beats his way through and clutches VICTORIA’s body. He extracts the scalpel with a single pull. RUTHVEN presses his hand over her wound as if willing her back to life. It is no use. He stands, still gripping the silver knife. His fingers begin to smoke and he throws away the scalpel, yelping. Surrounded by Dracula’s BRIDES, their faces transforming with hunger and rage, RUTVHEN shakes inside his finery.

RUTHVEN

It is over, Prince. As a widower, you have no right to rule.

CHARLES stands still, certain of death. DRACULA is on his feet, cloak rippling around him like a thundercloud. Tusks explode from his mouth, his hands become spear-tipped clusters. He raises a hand, useless chain dangling from his wrist, and points at CHARLES. Beyond speech, he spits out rage and hate.

CHARLES walks backwards. The vampires, suddenly sober, gather. The women of the harem and the officers of the guard. The women pounce first and bear him on to the floor, ripping...

GENEVIEVE pulls a hell-cat from the fray and pitches her across the room. GENEVIEVE bares her teeth and hisses at the fallen woman. Anger gives her strength. She hauls CHARLES free, thumping and stabbing with her hands. GENEVIEVE spits and shrieks with the other she-creatures, pulling handfuls of hair and scratching at red eyes. CHARLES, bloodied, still lives.

The BRIDES scrabble away, giving GENEVIEVE room. CHARLES stands by her, still in a daze. HENTZAU comes forward, Dracula’s champion. He makes a fist and a point of bone slides from his knuckles. It grows long and straight and sharp, a living sword.

GENEVIEVE steps out of range of the bone-rapier. The courtiers form a circle like a prizefight crowd. Still shackled to his dead Queen, DRACULA watches. HENTZAU whirls about, sword moving fast. She hears the blade whisper and, moments later, realises her shoulder is opened, a red line trickling on her dress. She snatches up a footstool
and raises it as a shield, parrying the next slice. HENTZAU cuts through cover and cushion, fixing his blade in wood. As he pulls free, horsehair bleeds.

HENTZAU

Fighting with the furniture, eh?

HENTZAU makes passes near her face and locks of her hair float free. MERRICK, a broken FOOTMAN in one hand, throws CHARLES his sword-cane. With a tap, HENTZAU whisks GENEVIEVE’s stool from her hands. He grins and draws back for a thrust at her heart. CHARLES slices down, knocking HENTZAU’s point out of true, and slashes back, edge of his blade slipping under HENTZAU’s jaw, sliding through coarse fur, opening skin and scraping bone.

HENTZAU howls and turns on CHARLES. He launches an assault, sword-point darting like a dragonfly. CHARLES parries a rapid compass of attacks, but is driven back and takes a wound in the chest. He falls down. HENTZAU raises his sword-arm; the blade begins a swishing descent. CHARLES, glimpsing GENEVIEVE, raises his own sword. HENTZAU’s arm slices against the silver blade. The sword-arm falls in a dead lump, cut clean through at the elbow. CHARLES runs HENTZAU through the heart and slides the dead vampire off his blade.
*

DRACULA comes down from his throne, steam pouring from his nostrils. He is beginning a transformation, wings spreading.

GENEVIEVE hauls CHARLES towards the doors. RUTHVEN is
in the way.

GENEVIEVE

Aside, Ruthven.

RUTHVEN hesitates then steps out of the way.

GENEVIEVE (quietly)

Very clever, my Lord.

MERRICK holds the doors open. DRACULA’s shadow grows, his wrath reaching out like a fog.

HALLWAY, BUCKINGHAM PALACE. INT. NIGHT.

GENEVIEVE helps CHARLES out of the throne-room. She licks blood from his face.

CHARLES

I couldn’t tell you.

GENEVIEVE shushes him. MERRICK shuts the doors and puts his enormous back to them.

MERRICK (howling)

Go.

Something smashes against the other side of the doors and a clawed hand punches through above MERRICK’s head, tearing at the wood. The hand makes a fist and enlarges its hole. GENEVIEVE
salutes MERRICK and helps CHARLES limp away. He bleeds badly from his chest wound.

ANTECHAMBER, BUCKINGHAM PALACE. INT. NIGHT.

As CHARLES and GENEVIEVE run, the doors behind them burst outwards. MERRICK is crushed under falling wood and stamping feet. The baying horde of courtiers floods forth. An enormous DRACULA, only glimpsed, is among them.

MARBLED HALLWAY, BUCKINGHAM PALACE. INT. NIGHT.

CHARLES and GENEVIEVE emerge, startling liveried vampires. GENEVIEVE pulls CHARLES on. We hear the thunder of pursuit. Among the clatter of boots, there is a single flap. Giant wings. A draught sucks at CHARLES and GENEVIEVE as they struggle through the main doors.

BUCKINGHAM PALACE. EXT. NIGHT.

The skies are bloodied. Fires burn. CHARLES and GENEVIEVE emerge from the palace.

CHARLES (shouts)

The Queen is dead. Dracula rules no more.

GENEVIEVE looks for a way out. The crowds roar and the fence shakes. People press in. The gates buckle. CHARLES and GENEVIEVE stumble down the wide steps and run towards the gates. The CHINESE GIRL nods and MR YEE takes hold of the iron bars and breaks the lock. The gates fall in, and CHARLES and GENEVIEVE are embraced by the crowd.

CHARLES (weak)

Gené, Gené, Gené.

GENEVIEVE

Shush. We must hurry.

The courtiers swarm out of the Palace, tangling with the Carpathians, and pitch into the crowd. A riot-like tussle ensues. Torches and wooden crucifixes are held aloft. GENEVIEVE still supports CHARLES.

DRACULA, enormous and inhuman, emerges as a living shadow, and watches with red eyes.

KATE, dressed as a man, shins up a pole, and snatches VAN HELSING’s skull. She holds it up in triumph. The fighting spreads. Cries of ‘Death to the Dead’. The CHINESE GIRL points up to the skies. A deeper darkness than night falls. A great shadow is all around, thrown over the crowds. Twin red moons look down. Slow-flapping winds knock people off their feet. The bat-shape fills the sky over the Palace.

For a moment, the crowds fall silent. Then a voice is raised against the shape.

KATE

Death to Dracula!

CHARLES

Kate Reed, Angel of the Insurrection...

More voices join. Torches are tossed into the air but fall short. Stones pulled from the drive are hurled. Shots are fired. The huge shadow soars. CARPATHIANS charge the crowds, laying about themselves with sabres. The mob is easily beaten back through the main gates.

EVERYONE

Death to Dracula! Death to Dracula!

CHARLES

It’s done. His rule is broken.

He swoons and GENEVIEVE has to carry him out of the flow of the people.

QUIETER SPOT NEAR THE PALACE. EXT. NIGHT.

She lays him down and opens his clothes. His wound is bad. GENEVIEVE looks back.

DRACULA alights on the roof of the Palace: a gargoyle-shape, wings settling like a cloak. In the night, fires burn high.

MYCROFT (v.o.)

The Empire has become a powderkeg... but London is always the fuse, Beauregard. And anything might be the spark.

GENEVIEVE

Charles, I can save you. Charles, darling, drink... Turn vampire, and live.

GENEVIEVE bites her wrist. Blood bursts on to CHARLES’s face. He looks up, dying, vision blurry, and shakes his head.

GENEVIEVE

You don’t have to be like him. Like them. You don’t have to be like me. You just have to live...

CHARLES

I love you forever. (Blood splashes on his lips.)

GENEVIEVE (whispers)

Forever.

CHARLES drinks.
§
We pull up, leaving the couple, and see the news of the Queen’s death, the call to insurrection, spreading.

LONDON. EXT. NIGHT.

DRACULA’s shadow. The wings fold, dwindling.

*
In the script, Rupert of Hentzau has an expanded role, basically as a Number Two baddie after Arthur Holmwood.

*
This short scene was included to make clear why Mr Yee was out to kill Geneviève. The Lord of Strange Deaths and his daughter get slightly bigger roles, though still go unnamed.

*
A new character in the screenplay, named for Oliver Twist (yes, I know that’s set half a century earlier). He combines the book’s characters of Georgie, the pot-boy at the Ten Bells (whom Geneviève saves from Vardalek), and Ned, the copy-boy.

§
This parade passing faces is part of the whodunit angle, building up various characters as possible Ripper suspects.

#
This scene replaces the book’s
Chapter Fifteen
(‘The House in Cleveland Street’). I foresaw censorship problems with the male brothel and impalement, but also wanted to modify the potentially homophobic business of Vardalek’s predation on the rent boy. I took the opportunity to sell a tiny plot point that the public destruction of a vampire might contribute to the eventual revolution.

*
In the novel, Charles and Arthur are rivals rather than antagonists. This scene is something I wish I’d thought of while writing the book, playing up the short cut to success aspect of turning vampire in that it enables a poor fencer to best an expert.

*
This brings together two villains, and puts Mycroft’s conspiracy in peril.

*
This rearranges the business of Chapters Fifty-Five (“Fucking Hell!”) and Fifty-Six (‘Lord Jack’) a little, albeit with too much talk (I’d have pruned a lot if the script had gone into further drafts). I slightly prefer the way things pan out here, with Mary trying to defend the man who’s dissecting her and Charles shooting Jack during a fight to save Geneviève rather than summarily executing a helpless man.

*
This pays off Hentzau’s increased villainy in the script, and also shows that since his bout with Arthur, Charles has gained the skill and determination to best a vampire in a serious swordfight. The suggestion is that being bitten by Geneviève has also given him sharper reflexes.

§
And here’s yet another variant ending. Charles
nearly
dies, but it looks like Geneviève will save him with her blood. Stuart and Andre were keen on playing up the angle of whether Charles would turn into a vampire, and this was the payoff for that strand – keeping
it ambiguous in case we came to film the later books (in which Charles isn’t a vampire). When I came to write the third novel, set in 1959, I included this element in the backstory – the ending of the novel doesn’t say that this little scene
doesn’t
happen – to help explain Charles’ longevity.