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.”
“The young girl is not herself. She’s infected.” The knife tip dug a V in his skin, rasping against the stubble, loud in his ear.
“What if she’s like that deep down in her nature, and the other one has just awakened what she really is? Set her free?”
“That’s probably exactly what a vampire might argue. But no-one becomes a monster willingly.” The knife against his cheek did not move, but he felt it tremble.
Both men’s eyes were glued unwillingly to the screen.
That night Madeline begs Ingrid not to leave her room. She never feels tired at night any more, only excited, she says. But so wretched during the day. She hasn’t told anyone. Not everything. She can’t. How the cat comes onto her bed. How she tries to scream as it stretches across her, warm and heavy. How she feels its fur in her mouth…
Both men stared.
Madeline Smith says it’s like the life running out of her, blood being drawn, then she wakes, screaming. Ingrid Pitt unties the girl’s night dress—poor Madeline told by the producer it was for the Japanese version, but there was no Japanese version—and Ingrid pushes her back against the plump pillow. Her mouth is on the young girl’s throat, then slides down to her young breasts. In close-up, Madeline’s pretty eyes—poor child, Cushing remembered, a virgin, didn’t know what lesbians were—roll wide in simulated rapture…
“How were you bitten? Infected?”
Gledhill pressed the blade harder, making the old man’s head shy away. “Life. Life made me like this.”
Cushing could not be sure whether he detected glee, sarcasm or resignation. “Others need not be hurt. The very ones who—”
“You think I haven’t been hurt?” Gledhill spat through locked teeth. “I’ve been hurt in ways you can’t even fucking imagine.” He wiped spittle from his lips with the back of his free hand.
“That’s what made you what you are.” Cushing tried not to think of the knife any more, or the threats, or the obscenities. “You know that. And you know deep down the boy must suffer, because you suffered.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Who was it?”
“Jesus fucking Christ…”
Gledhill snatched the oyster knife away from the old man’s cheek, tossing it to his other hand and back, then plunging it dagger-like into the soft upholstery of the seat in front of him, tearing it back and forth, ripping the material, then slicing it across. The dramatic surges of the soundtrack seemed to accompany his action, and when he was finished he hunched forward, the oyster knife gripped in both fists between his knees, his forehead resting on the seat in front, his whole body shaking.
“Who?”
“Leave me. Go.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“You can fuck off.”
“I’m quite aware I can.”
“Why don’t you then?”
Peter Cushing prised open the other man’s fingers and gently took the knife from his fingers.
“Who?”
The pale man from the General’s party appears. The cadaverous man in the red-lined cape stands in silhouette in the woods as if bearing witness to Gledhill’s words.
“Someone who made me think I loved him. Someone who twisted me round his little finger.” He sniffed. A mocking musicality came to his voice, lifting it, lightening it: a delusion. “I fell for his charms, you could say.” He seemed fearful the bitterness in his words evoked no sympathy. “I have feelings too. Did have. Till he fucking ripped them out of me. Why the fuck am I telling you this?”
Madeline cries out. The house is in darkness. Kate O’Mara, the governess, runs in.
“I know you won’t listen to me,” Cushing said, “but… confess.”
A wettish snort, not even a snigger, in reply. “Bless me father for I have sinned. You make a good priest.”
“I have done.”
Outside the door the two women look at each other knowingly. Kate goes into Carmilla’s bedroom and turns down the lamp. In darkness Ingrid slips out of her dress. The moonlight outlines her naked form. Kate moves closer.
“All is not lost. Tell the police. Nothing can be worse than the Hell you’re enduring now. Do it. For the sake of your immortal soul.”
“Soul?” Now the sound through Gledhill’s nose was more weary than dismissive. He sat up straight again in the cinema seat and shook his head. “No. No way. I can’t. The boy… What would he think of me?”
“Dear God, man.” Peter Cushing could not disguise his bewilderment. “What do you imagine he thinks of you now?”
The blurry vision of Carmilla enters Madeline’s room. The vampire appears to be comforting her in her sickness. The young girl wonders if she’ll live until her father comes home…