“He loves me,” Gledhill said. “I know he does because he shows it. I never have to force him. He never says no. I never force him, ever.”
The Doctor arrives saying Mr Morton asked him to look in on his daughter. Kate O’Mara tells him Madeline has been ill, but it’s nothing to concern him.
“You know what they do in prison to people like me?”
Garlic flowers. Their antiseptic scent. Village gossip. The Doctor puts a cross round Madeline’s neck.
“Sometimes…” Gledhill struggled to complete the sentence he had in mind. “Sometimes I…” He failed a second time.
Ingrid returns to the daughter’s room. She sees the garlic flowers and crucifix and backs out fearfully.
The two men sat in silence facing the screen.
The Doctor rides through the woods, against unconvincing back-projection. His horse suddenly shies and he is thrown. Carmilla comes round the edge of the lake towards him. In a flurry of autumn leaves she wrestles with him and sinks her fangs into his neck.
Neither Gledhill nor Cushing spoke. It was almost as though they had come to watch a horror film, and nothing more.
George Cole rides for the Doctor, but runs into a coach carrying not only Peter Cushing but also Douglas Wilmer—somewhat aged by make-up since the decapitation prologue—a man The General says he has travelled miles to find. To George Cole’s horror the dead body of the Doctor is on the back of the vehicle. Peter Cushing says: “Now I can tell you, and leave us if you wish. Our destination is Karnstein castle.”
“What do you want me to do?” Gledhill said.
The great chords crash. The coach pulls up at their destination. Douglas Wilmer holds a lamp aloft.
“Primarily I don’t want anything to hurt the boy further, in any way. Bringing in the police and the courts will most surely do that. Horribly. But I shall do that if you leave me no alternative.”
“What do you want me to do?” Gledhill repeated.
Cushing said what had been in his heart all along, and begged that some sliver of humanity inside the man still might grasp the simplicity of it:
“Do what is right and good, for once.”
“Good?”
Said more in genuine puzzlement than disdain.
“Vampires are intelligent beings, General. They know when the forces of good are arrayed against them.”
“Save yourself, in the only way you can. Disappear. Turn to dust.”
Carmilla is dragging Madeline down the stairs. She needs to take her with her. Kate O’Mara pleads with Ingrid Pitt to take her too. Ingrid sinks her teeth in Kate’s neck. Madeline screams. Jon Finch leaps off his horse and bursts in. Ingrid sweeps his sword out of his hand and grabs him but he grabs a dagger tucked in his boot and holds it up in the shape of a cross. Ingrid backs away from it. He throws the knife. It passes right through her. Double exposure. She fades and is gone.
In the Karnstein graveyard the vampire hunters see the figure of Carmilla entering the ruins. They follow, led by Douglas Wilmer’s lantern. The long cobwebby table is a nod to the first Hammer Dracula, perhaps. One of them finds a necklace on the floor. Peter Cushing looks up. They’ve found the vampire’s resting place.
They lift the stone slab from the floor. Peter Cushing and George Cole carry the coffin into the chapel. Wearing black gloves, Peter Cushing rolls back the shroud. “I will do it.” He takes off the gloves. George Cole kneels at the altar and prays. Peter Cushing takes the stake. Raises it in both hands. Thrusts it down into and through her chest. Back at the house, her victim cries out. Ingrid Pitt’s eyes flash open, then close, as blood pools on her chest. It is over. But not over.
Peter Cushing says, “There’s no other way.”
He draws his sword. With it firmly in one hand, he lifts Ingrid Pitt up by the hair in her coffin. Cuts off her head in one swipe.
As George Cole utters a heartfelt prayer that their country is rid of such devils, Peter Cushing’s General lowers the severed head into the coffin. And Carmilla’s portrait on the castle wall, young and beautiful as she was long ago—in life—turns slowly to that of a decomposed and rotting skull.
Cushing turned his head and found the seat next to him empty.
As the cast list rolled up the screen, he stood and looked round an auditorium lit only by the spill from the projector beam. He shielded his eyes with the flat of his hand but it was clear nobody was present but himself.
He was still standing facing the small, square window of the projection room when the house lights faded up. He found himself even more clearly in a sea of empty seats. The smell of popcorn and Kia-Ora returned. This time he found it almost pleasant.
He walked into the sunlit foyer with one arm in his coat sleeve. A number of young couples were queuing for tickets for the next performance. One person noticed him and smiled. He raised a hand, not too ostentatiously, not wanting to draw attention to himself, then criss-crossed his scarf on his chest and dragged on the rest of his coat. Another few people arrived. Quite a healthy gathering for an early evening showing. He was pleased, in a subdued way, as if one of his children had done well at school, with little help from himself. The film was a hit, and as long as the public liked it, he wished it well.
He let the heavy door shut behind him. Even more than usually when he had seen a film in the afternoon, the sunlight came as a shock. It almost blinded him, but he was grateful for the warmth on his skin. He raised his chin and stood with his eyes closed for several minutes, and when he opened them, found it noticeably strange that there was not a single gull in the sky.
Ten minutes later he committed the oyster knife to the sea with a throw worthy of a fielder at the Oval.
When he arrived home at 3 Seaway Cottages he felt Helen’s smile in the air immediately, like the most delicate and distinctive fragrance.
“Look.” He lifted his hand up in front of his face. “I’m still shaking.”
You were wonderful.
“Nonsense.”
You are wonderful, Peter.
He felt a strange fluttering at the back of his throat and looked at the door to the living room but didn’t open it.
“So are you, my love.”
Suddenly he found he was ravenously hungry for the first time in he didn’t know when.
In the kitchen he took two slices of bread and cooked cheese on toast under the grille, served with a generous dollop of HP sauce. His appetite undiminished, he made two more rounds, slightly burned, just the way he liked it.
That night he slept soundly, and without dreams.
He was woken early the following morning by the telephone ringing as if on a distant shore. He sat up in bed, body lifted as if by a crane, not particularly hurrying to do so. Recent events still had not returned fully to his consciousness. Images drifted. Feelings coagulated, some real, some imagined, all vague and irrepressible. His head was too thick with slumber to sort fact from fiction and he wondered if he was waking up or acting waking up. He needed a minute to think about that, if you’d be so kind. The telephone, impolitely, was still ringing with a persistence normally reserved for insects and small children. He slumped back onto the pillow, hoping to return to the land of Nod. The telephone had other ideas.