At the Twilight's Last Gleaming by David Bischoff Page B

felt something like I’d never felt before. I felt rapture. I felt his strength and his presence, his beauty and his ardor — his need. I felt strength and power in a delirious mixture of earthiness and transcendence.
    He smelled like stargazer lilies.
    Beneath the cape, he opened his mouth. I held my neck up to accept him — but he had no fangs in his teeth, just a chagrined smile.
    “I hope I did that right,” he whispered.
    There was a sudden burst of applause.
    My spell burst.
    I blinked.
    “It seemed — uhm — fine,” I said.
    Emory Clarke lifted his cape from the bedside, and lifted his knee as well, rising back up to his full six foot four height, out of character and stooping again. He looked a bit sheepish as he smiled out at Mr. Crawley, who was hopping up onto the proscenium and walking toward us.
    “Emory, maybe just a little bit faster from the window. I’ll gauge it later with a bigger audience. Otherwise, just perfect. You really have some nice posture, if you try. And Rebecca…”
    He looked at me, with an odd look.
    “You surprised me.”
    “I did?”
    “You were spectacular!”
    “I was?” I said.
    “You had just the right mixture of fright — and something else. Fascination? Yes, something like that. Do you think you can do that again?”
    “I’ll try.”
    He looked at me with an odd gravity, as though he was reassessing me. I think he thought I was a better actress than he’d thought, since he had mostly picked me for the role because of my English accent. What he couldn’t have known was that I wasn’t acting.
    I
had
felt frightened.
    I
had
felt fascinated.
    And I’d felt a lot more too boot that I hoped hadn’t shown.
    Emory Clarke had been a revelation. A revelation in the role of Count Dracula.
    I wasn’t the only one who’d been bowled over and shocked by the announcement that Peter Harrigan, the school’s best actor, had selected the meatier character role of Van Helsing instead of the matinee idol role of Dracula. Plenty of jaws had dropped. Emory Clarke, class weirdo — as Dracula? What, had his father had a strange whim that he son should tred the boards? And pulled strings?
    But as soon as Mr. Crawley had put a cape on him at the first rehearsal and instructed him to stand up straight and “perform like you did in my office”, jaws dropped even further.
    Yes, Emory was tall.
    But shaven and without hair falling in his face, he was absolutely majestic. He was handsome, regal — and he had a strong presence.
    “Oh yes. When we get some make up on you — that will sock it to the audience!” cooed the English teacher drama coach, echoing the popular phrase from NBC’s
Laugh In
.
    Everyone was a bit aghast and all the girls looked at Emory in a different way. The effect hadn’t been lost on me, but I was still focusing on Peter, who was so happy and lost in his practice of his European accent and manners as Van Helsing that he seemed totally oblivious to anything else.
    Yes, yes, here I was in close proximity to my target. But if he was so wrapped up in this role he barely paid attention to anyone, how would he notice me?
    I’d congratulated him on the role and told him it would be fun working with such a good actor — and he’d just smiled at me condescendingly, as though he was accepting his due, with no regard whatsoever to the individual — and sex — and the individual distributing the praise!
    Still, I made every effort to sit as close to him as possible. I wore a lavender perfume — hopefully Victorian style — to get his attention. I chirped laughter happily whenever he made something even close to a joke. I used every possible wile short of baring my breasts to get his attention. Nothing seemed to work very well. He was off in Thespianland, in his own fantasy world of scenery chewing.
    “Oh, he’s just drawing on his inner Peter Cushing,” Harry had joked. Peter Cushing, of course, was the best known Van Helsing of the sixties, Edward van Sloan