You Must Survive Count Dracula's Midlife Crisis

Van Helsing :
Keely behaved like 

a man demented, obsessed.

Utterly lost.
All but the last vestige 

of sanity had left him.

His words were prompted by some force, some...
...some nightmare outside himself.

It is A Shadow,
A Spectre that haunts us all.

Col. Matthews of Division-X :
Murray, why the hell didn't you get your people 
[ Special Branch ]
to raid Pelham House?
Should have called them the moment
you got out of the damned place.

Inspector Murray of The Yard :
Well, as a matter of fact, I...

Van Helsing :
I'm sorry Colonel.
Inspector Murray was quite right.
By the time The Police
would have got there, 
they would have found nothing.

Col. Matthews of Division-X :
Nothing? What about that...
...Chinese woman?

What about all of those...
...unfortunate creatures in the cellar?

Van Helsing :
We are not dealing with ordinary criminals, Colonel Mathews.
Nor with enemy agents.
These people have powers beyond anything you can imagine.
It didn't help Professor Keeley.

Col. Matthews of Division-X :
Well, he's out of it now, anyway.
One down and three to go.

Van Helsing :
The Keeley Foundation...
...who started it?
Whose money's behind it?
Thank you.

Col. Matthews of Division-X :
Some tycoon called Denham.
D. D. Denham.
There's very little known about him
He lives in the heart of the Denham Building. 
No thank you.
He allows no press interviews,
no photographs...
A recluse.

Van Helsing :
Denham.

Inspector Murray of The Yard :
Mean something?

Van Helsing :
A link, possibly a major one.
Yes, here we are :
The Denham Group of Companies.
Chemicals, oils, banks.
Board of Directors : 
Denham himself.
The Right Honorable John Porter.
Lord Carradine.
General Freebourne.
And Keeley.

Inspector Murray of The Yard :
And Uncle Tom Cobley and all!

Col. Matthews of Division-X :
This man, Denham,
perhaps Hanson was right.

Van Helsing :
I think he was.
You've already seen
a manifestation of vampirism.

The cult lives, it breeds,
it spreads its vileness
like a contagion.

Like The Plague.
My Family has fought
this corruption for generations.

Each time it was destroyed,
so has it risen again, 

like The Phoenix,
but hellbent on revenge.

Only this time...
This time I believe it's not merely
a personal vendetta...
...but something infinitely more far reaching.

The plague bacillus, Pelham House, the 
mental destruction of intellectuals
such as Professor Keeley and the others
it is all an integral part
of a means to a definite end.

The real force,
The Shadow I spoke of is more sinister, more obscene
than any monstrosity you can think of.
Lord of Corruption, 

Master of the Undead...

Count Dracula.
Col. Matthews of Division-X :
Is there really such a creature?

Inspector Murray of The Yard :
You should have been in that bloody cellar, Colonel!

Col. Matthews of Division-X :
Incredible.
My Department is being closed down, orders of John Porter,
half my staff have been arrested, 

two have been killed, 

they've labelled us subversives, 

and the heavies are damned well looking for us, 

and all this because of a...
...a vampire?

Inspector Murray of The Yard :
Van Helsing, for God's sake!

Van Helsing :
Jessica, you should be resting.

Van Helsing :
Oh, I'm all right, Grandfather.
Thank you.

Van Helsing :
I destroyed Count Dracula once.
It was more than two years ago in Saint Bartolph's churchyard.

This creature can live again...
by reincarnation.

It requires a disciple --
Someone well versed in the ritual.

Col. Matthews of Division-X :
The Chinese woman, Chin Yang?

Van Helsing :
Possibly.
She would have to know the exact location of Dracula's grave.

I passed the site of Saint Bartolph's tonight —
The churchyard has long since vanished.
An office block has been built there, now.
That new building is about two years old.

Inspector Murray of The Yard :
Well, if it's been there for two years...
That means This Thing has been around since then.

Van Helsing :
So it would seem.
And those women in the cellar, their names have probably been on the files of your Missing Persons Bureau for two years.

Anyway, that new office block belongs to the Denham Group of Companies.
Now, I don't know whether The Fifth Guest was D. D. Denham, 

but this I do know :
Vampires are spectral creatures.

Their image casts no reflection in a mirror.
Nor can the lens of a camera record their likeness.

Inspector Murray of The Yard :
So there was someone there.

Van Helsing :
Or some thing.
Norman Hanson saw it but his camera couldn't record it.

Inspector Murray of The Yard :
How the hell do you fight a vampire?
With cloves of garlic?

Van Helsing :
There are many ways.
The Symbols of Good are used
to combat The Forces of Evil.
The Crucifix, The Word of God
as written in The Holy Bible.
Clear running water,
symbolizing purity,
and it lives in mortal dread of Silver.

Inspector Murray of The Yard :
Anything else?

Van Helsing :
The Hawthorn Tree, which provided Christ
with his Crown of Thorns,
The Light of Day...
And a wooden stake,
driven through the heart.

Inspector Murray of The Yard :
What about the 23rd, the day that Keeley mentioned...

Van Helsing :
Yes indeed. The 23rd of this month.
That I fear is the worst of all.
It is The Sabbat for the Undead.

Inspector Murray of The Yard :
What significance is that?

Van Helsing :
There are satanic circles which govern Our Fate,
and the fate of This Earth.
Perhaps even The Universe.

Now, throughout history...
there are certain times,
certain dates which are marked
by awesome catastrophes.

Each event is carefully plotted,
and a definite pattern emerges.

Every disaster This World
has ever suffered coincides with a point
wherein these circles meet...
...and cross.
In this century alone
they heralded the outbreak of...
two devastating world wars.

Inspector Murray of The Yard :
And another disaster is imminent?

Van Helsing :
Could be.

Inspector Murray of The Yard :
The 23rd.
That's the day after tomorrow.

Van Helsing :
This must happen tomorrow...
...at midnight.

Inspector Murray of The Yard :
Why, it's even sooner.

Van Helsing :
At that hour The Devil holds
a Balance of Power.
He marshals his disciples.
The Living and The Dead.
In Satanic Covens it is the celebration
of supreme blasphemy.

The Sabbat of The Undead.
Inspector Murray of The Yard :
I've heard of the witches sabbat.

Van Helsing :
No, this date is much more important.
It's more profound.
Even more significant than the night of Walpurgis.
Now Keeley said the bacillus had to be
ready by the 23rd.
Why?

Van Helsing :
The date chosen by Dracula himself.
The 23rd day of this 11th month.
The emerging patterns.
The Night of The Soulless Ones.
And in the turmoil and fear that follows,
a group of... warped men emerge to take control.
A Politician, a Soldier,
an Industrialist, a Landowner.

Inspector Murray of The Yard :
But Dracula would eventually end up with 
A Totally Barren Earth!
With only disease and dead bodies to feed on...
surely even the vampire himself would perish.

Van Helsing :
Perhaps, deep in his subconscious,
that is what he really wants.
An end to it all.
He is a cursed immortal, existing on 
Violence, Fear and Dread.
Now suppose...
Now just suppose
he yearns for final peace.
What then?
He'd want to bring down
The Whole Universe with him!
The Ultimate Revenge!
Thousands dying of The Plague,
like The Shadow of Death itself,
one figure scything its way 
through the terror and anguish.

Count Dracula.
It is the Biblical prophecy
of Armageddon.

“The “Final Crisis,” as I saw it for a paper universe like DC’s, would be the terminal war between is and isn’t, between the story and the blank page. What would happen if the void of the page took issue with the quality of material imposed upon it and decided to fight back by spontaneously generating a living concept capable of devouring narrative itself? A nihilistic cosmic vampire whose only dream was to drain the multiverse dry of story material, then lie bloated beneath A Dead Sun, dying.

  I tried to show the DC universe breaking down into signature gestures, last-gasp strategies that were tried and tested but would this time fail, until finally even the characterizations would fade and The Plot become rambling, meaningless, disconnected. Although I lost my nerve a little, I must confess, and it never became disconnected enough.

  This, I was trying to say, is What Happens when you let Bad Stories EAT Good Ones. This is what it looked like when you allow the Anti-Life Equation to turn all Your Dreams to Nightmares.

  In The End, there was nothing left but Darkness and the first superhero, Superman, with a crude wishing machine, the deus ex machina itself, and a single wish powered by the last of His Own Life Force.

  He wished for A Happy Ending, of course.”

Signature Gestures

“I’d become fascinated by the power and the existence of the Evil-Has-Won narrative and resolved to explore it further in a major DC universe crossover event. I was asked to complete what Dan DiDio was now calling his Crisis trilogy with a wrap-up book to be called Final Crisis. 

Dan wanted to use this series as a showcase for Kirby’s New Gods characters, and if I was excited by the idea of having to improvise on that theme, I was even more overjoyed to know that I had access to Darkseid himself, the ultimate supertyrant with his Anti-Life Equation. 

As far as I was concerned, the Anti-Life Equation was being rammed down my gullet every day in the papers and on TV, and I was sick of it; sick of being told the world was dying, and it was all because I’d forgot to turn off the bathroom light; sick of Fina(ncia)l Crisis, the War, and the teenage suicide bombers willing to die for the promise of a cheesy afterlife that sounded like a night out with the lap dance girls at Spearmint Rhino.

  With J. G. Jones and later Doug Mahnke on art, we set about dramatizing the breakdown of the rational enlightenment story of progress and development as it succumbed to a horror tale of failure, guilt, and submission to blind authority.

   

  I brushed up on the cheerful literature of apocalypse and doomsday, refamiliarizing myself with the various revelations, Ragnaroks, and myths of the end times to construct a thoroughly modern Armageddon in which half the human race was possessed by an evil god who announced his arrival in the form of Anti-Life Equation e-mails and small acts of Cruelty that grow to consume The World. 

What would it look like if a comic-book universe died, and what could it tell us about what we were doing to ourselves?

  The “final crisis,” as I saw it for a paper universe like DC’s, would be the terminal war between is and isn’t, between the story and the blank page. 

What would happen if the void of the page took issue with the quality of material imposed upon it and decided to fight back by spontaneously generating a living concept capable of devouring narrative itself? 

A nihilistic cosmic vampire whose only dream was to drain the multiverse dry of story material, then lie bloated beneath a dead sun, dying.

  I tried to show the DC universe breaking down into signature gestures, last-gasp strategies that were tried and tested but would this time fail, until finally even the characterizations would fade and the plot become rambling, meaningless, disconnected. Although I lost my nerve a little, I must confess, and it never became disconnected enough.

  This, I was trying to say, is what happens when you let bad stories eat good ones. This is what it looked like when you allow the Anti-Life Equation to turn all your dreams to nightmares.

  In the end, there was nothing left but darkness and the first superhero, Superman, with a crude wishing machine, the deus ex machina itself, and a single wish powered by the last of his own life force.

  He wished for a happy ending, of course.

  Final Crisis was a bestseller, but it divided the Internet crowd like Alexander’s sword. One outraged reader even confidently predicted that I would, someday soon, be brought to account for the “evil” I had done. For a comics fan scorned, it seemed, the measure of evil lay not in genocide or child abuse but in continuity details deliberately overlooked by self-important writers, of plot points insufficiently telegraphed, and themes made opaque or ambiguous.

  If only one-tenth of the righteous, sputtering wrath of these anonymous zealots could be mustered against the horrors of bigotry or poverty, we might find ourselves overnight in a finer world.

  That’ll catch on.

 

A Happy Ending

“This, I was trying to say, is what happens when you let bad stories eat good ones. 

This is what it looked like when you allow the Anti-Life Equation to turn all your dreams to nightmares. 

In the end, there was nothing left but Darkness and the first superhero, Superman, with a crude wishing machine, the deus ex machina itself, and a single wish powered by the last of his own life force. 

He wished for a Happy Ending, of course.”

AXIS MUNDI : Heading Rapidly South

They •always• get started. 

They happen everywhere there's People. 

Mondas, Telos, Earth, Planet 14, Marinus. 

Like Sewage and Smartphones and Donald Trump —some things are just Inevitable. 

People get the Cybermen wrong. 

There's no evil plan, no evil genius. 

Just parallel evolution : 

(People + Technology) — Humanity = 

The Internet = Cyberspace = Cybermen. 

Always read The Comments.... 

Because one day, They'll be An Army. 

The Architect: 

The function of The One is now to return to the Source, allowing a temporary dissemination of the code you carry, reinserting the prime program. After which, you will be required to select from the Matrix 23 individuals – 16 female, 7 male – to rebuild Zion. Failure to comply with this process will result in a cataclysmic system crash, killing everyone connected to the Matrix, which, coupled with the extermination of Zion, will ultimately result in the extinction of the entire human race.

Neo:

You won’t let it happen. 

You can’t. 

You need human beings to survive.

The Architect :

There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.

And it comes to one great statement, which for me is a key statement of the understanding of myth and symbols. He says. “I saw myself on The Central Mountain of The World, the highest place. And I had a vision, because I was seeing in a sacred manner, of the world.” And the sacred central mountain was Harney Peak in South Dakota. 

And then he says, 

“But the central mountain is everywhere.”

 That is a real mythological realization.

BILL MOYERS: 

Why?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

It distinguishes between the local cult image, Harney Peak, and its connotation, the center of the world. 

The center of the world is the hub of the universe, axis mundi, do you know, the central point, the pole star around which all revolves. The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, stillness is eternity, realizing the relationship of the temporal moment to the eternal not moment, but forever -is the sense of life. Realizing how this moment in your life is actually a moment of eternity, and the experience of the eternal aspect of what you’re doing in the temporal experience is the mythological experience, and he had it. So is the central mountain of the world Jerusalem, Rome, Banaras. Lhasa, Mexico City, you know? Mexico City, Jerusalem, is symbolic of a spiritual principle as the center of the world.

BILL MOYERS: 

So this little Indian was saying, there is a shining point where all lines intersect?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

That’s exactly what he said.

BILL MOYERS: 

He was saying God has no circumference.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

God is an intelligible sphere, let’s say a sphere known to the mind, not to the senses, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. And the center, Bill, is right where you’re sitting, and the other one is right where I’m sitting. And each of us is a manifestation of that mystery.

“I’d become fascinated by the power and the existence of the evil-has-won narrative and resolved to explore it further in a major DC universe crossover event. I was asked to complete what Dan DiDio was now calling his Crisis trilogy with a wrap-up book to be called Final Crisis. 

Dan wanted to use this series as a showcase for Kirby’s New Gods characters, and if I was excited by the idea of having to improvise on that theme, I was even more overjoyed to know that I had access to Darkseid himself, the ultimate supertyrant with his Anti-Life Equation. 

As far as I was concerned, the Anti-Life Equation was being rammed down my gullet every day in the papers and on TV, and I was sick of it; sick of being told the world was dying, and it was all because I’d forgot to turn off the bathroom light; sick of Fina(ncia)l Crisis, the War, and the teenage suicide bombers willing to die for the promise of a cheesy afterlife that sounded like a night out with the lap dance girls at Spearmint Rhino. 

With J. G. Jones and later Doug Mahnke on art, we set about dramatizing the breakdown of the rational enlightenment story of progress and development as it succumbed to a horror tale of failure, guilt, and submission to blind authority. 

I brushed up on the cheerful literature of apocalypse and doomsday, refamiliarizing myself with the various revelations, Ragnaroks, and myths of the end times to construct a thoroughly modern Armageddon in which half the human race was possessed by an evil god who announced his arrival in the form of Anti-Life Equation e-mails and small acts of cruelty that grow to consume the world. 

What would it look like if a comic-book universe died, and what could it tell us about what we were doing to ourselves? 

The “final crisis,” as I saw it for a paper universe like DC’s, would be the terminal war between is and isn’t, between the story and the blank page. 

What would happen if the void of the page took issue with the quality of material imposed upon it and decided to fight back by spontaneously generating a living concept capable of devouring narrative itself? 

A nihilistic cosmic vampire whose only dream was to drain the multiverse dry of story material, then lie bloated beneath a dead sun, dying. 

I tried to show the DC universe breaking down into signature gestures, last-gasp strategies that were tried and tested but would this time fail, until finally even the characterizations would fade and the plot become rambling, meaningless, disconnected. 

Although I lost my nerve a little, I must confess, and it never became disconnected enough. 

This, I was trying to say, is what happens when you let bad stories eat good ones. This is what it looked like when you allow the Anti-Life Equation to turn all your dreams to nightmares. In the end, there was nothing left but darkness and the first superhero, Superman, with a crude wishing machine, the deus ex machina itself, and a single wish powered by the last of his own life force. 

He wished for a happy ending, of course. 

Final Crisis was a bestseller, but it divided the Internet crowd like Alexander’s sword. One outraged reader even confidently predicted that I would, someday soon, be brought to account for the “evil” I had done. For a comics fan scorned, it seemed, the measure of evil lay not in genocide or child abuse but in continuity details deliberately overlooked by self-important writers, of plot points insufficiently telegraphed, and themes made opaque or ambiguous. 

If only one-tenth of the righteous, sputtering wrath of these anonymous zealots could be mustered against the horrors of bigotry or poverty, we might find ourselves overnight in a finer world. 

That’ll catch on.”