Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [180]
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