But she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t bear the sight. Sister Hildegard’s hands covered her face, until gaunt, sunken-eyed Sister Ruth prised them away, forcing the young girl to watch. Geraldine stared along the row. Next to the devout hunchback, Sister Thomas Aquinas, she could see Natasha. Natasha Selkirk...standing with her eyes fixed on the vile proceedings. Geraldine thought of the body she lad left bleeding on the hearth of the flat in Kensington.

  Kensington Gore.

  Natasha Selkirk as “Sister Ingrid”...Sullen, resilient, rebellious Sister Ingrid. The hero of the piece. Not moving her lips with the other nuns. Not gracing the brutality before her with praise to her God—if she had one. Geraldine met her eyes and her defiance, knowing what would happen next—uniquely, the only one of them who wasn’t startled at the booming sound of heavy knocking at the monastery doors.

  Cut to close-up.

  The whip hung loosely in Sister Gertrude’s fist, blood dripping off it onto the mosaic floor at her sandaled feet.

  “Who is that, at this hour?” Mother Ursula’s one eye rotated madly.

  The nuns rushed in a flowing stream of white habits and pink, agitated faces, a flock of geese through the stone cloisters and across the snow-bedecked courtyard, white on white. The strength of three women—no, four—needed to lift the huge wooden beam holding the main door shut. No sooner opened than the stranger fell into their arms.

  I know who, thought Geraldine. I know who you are...

  They cradled him in their white robes—his undertaker garb almost imperceptible under the blood.

  “It’s a man!”

  “Full marks for observation, Sister Hildegard,” said the Abbess.

  “We can’t let him in!” said Sister Ruth. “No man is allowed—”

  “This place is supposed to be free of sin,” said Sister Gertrude.

  “We can’t let him die,” said Sister Ingrid.

  “Letting him die would not be God’s will,” said Sister Hildegard.

  “And how do you know God’s will, you stupid girl?” said the Abbess.

  All the while Geraldine simply staring down at the stranger’s bloodstained face.

  Marcus’s face.

  “If we let him perish, Mother,” Sister Ingrid was saying, “would that not be a sin on our heads?”

  Geraldine saw the door was still open, but before she could make a break for it, saw the enormous crossbar dropped back securely in position. She had turned towards it when something grabbed her wrist. She sucked in breath sharply. Marcus had grabbed her. Bloody Marcus. Feverish Marcus. Dying Marcus. She prised off his fingers and the nuns carried him away. She followed, peering between them into the cell, looking down at him as he lay on the straw bed, the blood-soaked cloth knotted around his neck, his heavy, clotted breathing matching the redness that slathered his body. Terrified to step closer, she rubbed the wrist he had touched. It hurt. It was real. He was real. He was here.

  “He must’ve been attacked by some forest animal,” blurted Sister Hildegard. Geraldine could have easily completed the line of dialogue for her. A wolf, or bear...“A wolf, or bear.”

  “Quiet, child. Hot water. The least we can do is divest him of his filth. And his vestments.”

  “Trousers, Mother Ursula?”

  “Yes, trousers. Fetch water, one of you! Go!”

  The flurry of nuns departed, fluttering swans, gannet mutterings. Geraldine watched as the stranger’s clothes were methodically removed, buttons undone, shirt pulled back from naked shoulders. When one of the nuns returned with a wooden pail full of water, Geraldine was blocking her way. Geraldine took the bucket from her and approached the bed. The stranger was coughing up some unsightly mixture of blood, saliva and vomit. He hung over the side of the bed and dribbled into the receptacle, then lay back.

  “Avert your eyes, sisters. Go and pray your Lord to forgive you. And pray for him. This minute, I say!” They fled. Footsteps echoed. Mother Ursula dabbed the man’s forehead with a sponge.

  “God help this poor soul, lest he be lost to the Lord.” Words Geraldine had heard so many times as she’d scratched in her notebook with her Biro in the dark auditorium of the Cameo in Poland Street. And now she mouthed them as if they were coming from her own lips.

  She stared down at the monochrome vegetables floating in a bowl of thin, watery soup. She was sitting at a long table in the refectory with the rest of the nuns. She didn’t know if it was breakfast or dinner. Whether six hours had passed or twelve. Perhaps it had all happened in a cut.

  “One more mouth to feed.”

  “If he prevails until breakfast.”

  “I hope he will, don’t you?”

  “He shouldn’t be here. Only ill will come of it, mark my words.”

  “He’s a man.” Geraldine said, not quite sure if they could hear her or see her. Not sure, in fact, if she was real anymore, or just as fragmentary as they were—characters made of light on a cinema screen. “There’s no reason to be afraid of a man.”

  “Sister Geraldine is right,” said Sister Ingrid, looking her hard in the eyes. “Everyone deserves compassion.” She spoke the word with such contempt that Geraldine couldn’t help but go cold.

  “What about me?” She caught Sister Ingrid’s wrist before her spoon could reach her lips. “Do I deserve ‘compassion’?”

  Sister Ingrid looked at her with pity, and snorted a derisive laugh.

  “Please,” begged Geraldine. “Tell me. Why am I here?”

  “Why, to atone for your sins,” Sister Hildegard said.

  “My sins?”

  “Why are any of us here?” Sister Ingrid abandoned her spoon, licked the last of the gravy from her plate, then dropped it down. “I was an unmarried mother. I brought shame on my family. I was called a whore. So they sent me here and they took my baby from my arms. I barely got to give him a name. Hansel.” Her bitterness, Geraldine thought—like a well into which you dropped a pebble and it never hit the bottom.

  Sister Thomas Aquinas, the hunchback, stirred the unappetising gruel she stared into. “I was sent here because I wasn’t born in God’s image.”

  “I was fat,” said Sister Gertrude.

  “I was an orphan,” said Sister Ruth, eyes fixed on the middle distance. “Good for nothing, except my father’s pleasure in the dead of night, till I got too old for his liking.”

  “Did your father love you, Geraldine?” asked Sister Ingrid.

  “No! I mean, yes. But not like that. Never like that.”

  “But did you ever really do enough to deserve that love? Honestly?”

  “He was proud of me,” said Geraldine. “I know he was.”

  “I know what I’d do to make him proud of me,” said Sister Ruth, turning her head blankly towards Geraldine. Her lips peeled back from a grin, and Geraldine saw that her incisors were long, white and pointed.

  She shot to her feet, knocking the table, spinning her plate, which clattered to the floor. She stepped back off the communal pew, retreating away as the nuns rose to their feet slowly, one by one. Sister Gertrude wiped saliva from her lips revealing the same crocodile grimace. Sister Hildegard, tittering like a lunatic, displayed hers. Geraldine brandished her spoon—a nonsensical act which made them all laugh like cats. She threw it. Sister Thomas Aquinas flicked it from its trajectory as if deflecting a bothersome fly.

  “Why are you here, Sister Geraldine?” Sister Ingrid, Natasha, walked towards her at a leisurely pace. “To confess? God likes a good confession.”

  Geraldine reversed through the gothic arch of the doorway until her back touched the far wall of the corridor. Natasha, Sister Ingrid, seemed to derive a great deal of pleasure from her horror, her grinning maw sporting the sharpest and most lustrous fangs of all.

  Geraldine shuffled away from them along the length of the wall. The nuns pursued her, not with any great urgency, rather as a cat toys with a mouse before the kill.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Geraldine sobbed. “What I did what was right. I was only doing my job.” At that they whooped like hyenas. Shadows tall on the stonework. A forest pack, fastened upon its wounded and helpless prey. “If Marcus did what he did because of me, I’m sorry!”

  “If only you could cut out that part of your life, eh?” Sister Ingrid made a scissor shape with two fingers and moved it horizontally in front of her face. “Snip! Snip! Snip!”

  Sister Hildegard skipped past her, lifting her hem, advancing on Geraldine with a parroting taunt. “Not acceptable! Not acceptable!”

  “New paragraph...What was it like, when you killed me?” said Sister Ingrid, with genuine curiosity, tilting her head to one side.

  “Too much blood,” said Sister Ruth. “Far too much blood!”

  “Essential to keep it off-camera at all times!” Sister Thomas Aquinas added, wagging a mocking finger.

  “This might well be par for the course for our continental cousins. However...”

  “...we find it quite beyond the bounds of what normal British people might consider entertainment...”

  Geraldine, seeing that her only other avenue was blocked by more of them, spun on her heel and ran into the chapel, backing towards the altar. Sister Ingrid led her sisters in, throwing off her mantle, Natasha’s silken hair falling to her shoulders, as the flotilla of the undead paced leisurely towards their victim, the terror in their quarry tenderising the flesh for the feast.

  “Tell us about it, Geraldine. Go on,” said Sister Ingrid, touching the back of her head and showing her the blood on her fingertips. “Give us a thrill. Strictly X-certificate.”

  Geraldine backed into a figure, whirling round to see one-eyed Mother Ursula looming over her, and cried out, ducking away, running to the Bible on the lectern. That’s your armour, your education. And your sword. Don’t you forget that, young girl. She riffled through the pages, desperately...looking for—what? But suddenly the book burst into flames. Geraldine reeled backwards, shielding her face with her arms.

  “Your books can’t help you now, buttercup.”

  It was Marcus. Not “The Stranger” anymore. Not “Klaus” in the credits, but the reincarnated Count now, by way of a strutting Mick Jagger—cocksure, Christ-thin, as effete and well endowed as Nureyev, bloodstained shirt open to the waist exposing a tautly-muscled torso, black trousers tight as human skin. He picked up Natasha’s fur coat from the back of one of the pews and put it around his shoulders like a cape.

  “Our Father...” Marcus said, face opening in a slice of a grin

  She looked over at the organ pipes, where her dad stood next to his budgie cage, puzzling over a crossword in a folded newspaper.

  “Patient do-gooder, five letters.”

  “Saint,” she breathed.

  “Saint! Thank you.” As he filled in the letters with a stubby pencil, she could see that his hand was horribly diseased, covered in pustules and sores.

  “You are a saint,” said Marcus. “Look.”

  She followed his eye-line to a stained-glass window made in her image. Instead of INRI above the crucified Christ, there were the letters EBFC above the crucified Geraldine Copper.

  She turned back to see the vampire nuns, now in a line in front of her, all kneeling to face their master. He offered his thumb to each of them in turn and they took it in their mouths as piously as if taking a Holy wafer. She wanted to vomit. And knew he loved that. Adored it.

  One by one they fell prostrate, writhing, pulling off their own clothes and each others’. This wasn’t Bavaria any more. This was Chelsea. The light through the stained-glass windows began to change and throb, covering the walls with the spreading psychedelic amoebas of a lava lamp. She could hear the ghastly music of a party—a party inside her head, where they were blasting out the Rolling Stones—“Playing With Fire,” as if they knew how much she hated it. Hated everything about that kind of music and those kinds of people and this kind of film. Yet they were revelling in it, bathing in it, losing their souls in it. Breasts exposed. Pubic hair exposed. Everything exposed.

  “I don’t want to see this! This is wrong! Wrong!”

  Marcus walked towards her, baring his Pitchfork fangs in a smile. She realised she had that tiny crucifix around her neck she always wore, and whipped it out, hoping it would stop him.

  “Oh come on, darling,” he laughed. “That won’t protect you here! The Lord they worship is me. Haven’t you noticed?”

  Geraldine held it out resolutely. “You...You infected them all!”

  “You infected them. You and your God. You put them in chains. I set them free.”

  He gripped her crucifix with the thumb and forefinger of one hand, using the other to tear the chain from her neck and toss it into the shadows.

  “Dad! Daddy!”

  Geraldine looked desperately back in the direction of her father. Saw him reach into the cage, take the budgies in his fists, and squeeze them to fluttering death.

  She tore her eyes back to Marcus, who was now getting high on every succulent grain of her horror, and almost on top of her, the bite ready to descend.

  She sped to the only door that wasn’t blocked, pulling over a tall candlestick beside the altar to block his path, slamming the door after her, toppling a stack of chairs against it, fleeing up the spiral stone staircase of the bell tower, her footsteps echoing like the chinks of an axe blade against metal in a vast, amplifying cavern.

  The spiral took her upwards. A tunnel ascending to Heaven. She knew the tower was tall. Ridiculously phallic. She remembered the exterior shots. The unconvincing special effects. Unconvincing, yet now absolutely real. She paused for breath, her lungs protesting. Wanting to scream. Unable to. Already she could hear the vampire—Marcus—hurling his inhuman strength at the door, snarling with bestial impatience as his shoulder split the wood.

  The icy wind stabbed through the slat windows, making everything blend into one hideous howl—human, animal, god-like, devil-driven.

  She saw him below—the demon shape, climbing. Fur-wrapped, the gore-splattered dandy. The eyes. The pit-black eyes that called the shots. But she was the camera now. The POV was hers.

  After a hundred more steps her calves ached, she had a pain in her chest, it was almost too hard to breathe, the altitude was gouging it out of her—making her feel light-headed and dizzy. She sprawled, stumbling onto the parapet, hands spidering in the snow. No windows, just four stone arches open to the elements. Beyond that, only the infinity of the night sky and a three-hundred-foot drop which she saw, vertiginously, as she clung to one of the pillars before reeling herself back from the brink.

  Her eyes lost focus. Her legs lost strength. The whistling blizzard seemed party to her torment, raising gooseflesh on her freckled skin. She looked back down the staircase, the pit extending beneath the vast, twin, dangling bells. The shadow came, and there was nowhere to run.

  “There’s only one way down now, Geraldine. You know that, don’t you? It’s the option I took. The only option you’ve got.”

  Wanting to drown out the words, she pulled the bell ropes hard. Counterweights lifted her off her toes, but even as they tolled, she knew nobody would hear. They were deafening, but he’d lose them in the mix. There would be no more money for speaking parts. No extras. No one to save the day. The budget had run out.

  “Help me! HELP ME! HELP!”

  The shadow rose and elongated into the most terrible movie cliché; claw-like hands magnified into talons.

  She saw a stray rope lying on the ground, one end looped round a pulley. It was her only chance. If she could...not thinking beyond it...another quick look at the three-hundred-foot drop, she tied it in a loop around her waist, knotting it.

  The vampire’s bone-white hand reached a hundred yards for her throat.

  She backed away, stepping out of the makeshift lasso now dropped at her feet. Swung around a second time, hanging half-out over the precipice.

  “Help!...Help!”

  “Once upon a time everyone had to listen to you, didn’t they?” Marcus sneered, dots of snow swirling around his black locks. “Nobody can hear you now. Not even God.”

  He moved in on her, but she retreated around the island of the gigantic, ancient bells. “You think I’m weak, and I’m not. I’m strong. I’m stronger than you and I can defeat you. I’m not the damaged one. You’re the damaged one.”

  A flinch of a reaction in his face?...Her imagination?

  Just your imagination, girl!

  But he stopped, stopped dead—and in that pause the scene around her buckled, dissolved, and instead of being on the wind-swept parapet she was in a warm, luxurious room. A space on the wall where a painting used to hang. French windows with a broken pane, a broken vase, a toppled plinth, an overturned decanter leaking brandy into the expensive carpet. Two bodies lay on the floor: the man’s head bludgeoned to a pulp, the woman throttled by a curtain cord, her knickers around her ankles. Geraldine heard a toddler’s sniffling sobs behind her. Spun round to see a little boy sitting on the stairs (black hair, black eyes), tears running down his cheeks. She ran to the child and hugged him tightly to her chest.

  “Too late.” A passing sadness in Marcus’s ink-black eyes turned to incendiary rage. “Too late.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Geraldine whispered.

  She threw herself across the floor and grabbed the rope attached to the pulley, the loop of its other end circling Marcus’s feet, and yanked it as hard as she could, seeing it tighten round his ankles, ripping the legs from under him, and before he could even react, saw him lose balance and tilt backwards into the pall of night.

  In her mind the fur-clad figure plummeted. Twenty feet. Thirty feet. Into the blackness—the rope pulling taut with a jerk—the recoil bringing the rope back through the air, twirling like a whiplash, suddenly loose and unencumbered.

  Cut to, she thought.

  Shuffling to the parapet edge. Seeing him below her as she covered her mouth with her hand.

  The vampire, Marcus, impaled on the roof of the pine forest. The shaft of a single tree trunk poking up through his chest. The stark, denuded tip of it pointing to the stars and moon. He hung there as she looking down at him—writhing, pinioned, trapped, jerking, thrashing. Fighting, even as the un-life sapped from his husk of a body. Until the flailing stopped. Until the clasping claws lost their fervour. Until the sneering face contacted into a hideous mask and his eyes rolled bloodless white. Until he was the dead thing he was always meant to be. A Breughel corpse abandoned on a wheel. Motionless at last.