“You saw the bitch,” Gledhill said in the gloom. “What did she say? You know she’s a liar.”
“There seem to be an extraordinary number of liars in your life, Mr Gledhill.”
Peter Cushing and an elderly housekeeper run in and calm Laura down. They say it was a nightmare, that’s all. He kisses her forehead and they leave the room. They think of checking on Mircalla, but when they knock there is no answer. They presume she’s sleeping. But the bedroom is empty. Ingrid Pitt is outside under moonlight looking up at the window…
“I thought she seemed perfectly charming,” Cushing said, his eyes not straying from the screen. He pretended that it absorbed his attention. “Another woman with another boy who perhaps doesn’t dream of vampires, like Carl, but of another kind of… creature of the night.”
His companion remained silent. He found it uncommonly difficult to deliver the lines he’d prepared in his head.
“She told me you’d invariably take him off to bed, rather than her. That you’d spend time reading him stories, as a doting father should. Quite rightly. Your, ah, special time you called it, I believe… I wonder what your son might call it?”
“Now you are starting to bother me, old man.”
“I’m rather glad about that.”
The Doctor, played by reliable old Ferdy Mayne, tells Peter Cushing that his niece just needs some iron to improve her blood. Cut to Ingrid Pitt at the girl’s bedside. Laura tells her she doesn’t want her to leave. Ingrid lowers her head and touches her lips to the girl’s breast…
“What are you going to do? Organize a torchlight parade of peasants to storm up to the Transylvanian castle, beating at the gates?”
Peter Cushing tells a visiting Jon Finch that his niece doesn’t want to see anyone but Mircalla.
For a moment Cushing was taken aback by his own close-up. In spite of the make-up he looked tremendously ill. Of course he knew the reason. It was the toll of Helen’s illness, even then. He could see the strain in his eyes. But it was a shock to see it now, thirty feet across, vast, on display for the entire public to see. He’d been oblivious to it at the time. He’d had other preoccupations. Now it hit him like a blow and it took a second for him to steady his nerve, as he knew he must.
“You think you’re safe because you consider everyone to be as selfish and self-interested as yourself.” Cushing did not look at the other man as he lit another cigarette. A scream rang out: the General’s niece, after another nocturnal visitation. “You really are unable to contemplate that someone might act totally for the benefit of another human being, even though they themselves might suffer. And that’s where you’re misguided, and wrong. That’s precisely your undoing, you see.”
“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.”