They were all in Bucharest for the moment, as Francis supervised script-readings to ease Sheen into the Harker role. His fellow coach-passengers -Fredric Forrest (Westenra), Sam Bottoms (Murray) and Albert Hall (Swales) - had all been on the project for over a year, and had been through all this before in San Francisco as Francis developed John Milius's script through improvisation and happy accident. Kate didn't think she would have liked being a screenwriter. Nothing was ever finished.

She wondered who would end up playing Dracula. Since his brief marriage to Queen Victoria made him officially if embarrassingly a satellite of the British Royal Family, he had rarely been represented in films. However, Lon Chaney had taken the role in the silent London After Midnight, which dealt with the court intrigues of the 1880s, and Anton Walbrook played Vlad opposite Anna Neagle in Victoria the Great in 1937. Kate, a lifelong theatregoer who had never quite got used to the cinema, remembered Vincent Price and Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina in the 1930s.

Aside from a couple of cheap British pictures which didn't count, Bram Stoker's Dracula - the singular mix of documentation and wish-fulfilment that inspired a revolution by showing how Dracula could have been defeated in the early days before his rise to power - had never quite been filmed. Orson Welles produced it on the radio in the 1930s and announced it as his first picture, casting himself as Harker and the Count, using first-person camera throughout. RKO Pictures thought it too expensive and convinced him to make Citizen Kane instead. Nearly ten years ago, Francis had lured John Milius into writing the first pass at the script by telling him nobody, not even Orson Welles, had ever been able to lick the book.

Francis was still writing and rewriting, stitching together scenes from Milius's script with new stuff of his own and pages torn straight from the book. Nobody had seen a complete script, and Kate thought one didn't exist.

How many times did the monster have to die for her to be rid of him? Her whole life had been a dance with Dracula, and he haunted her still. She was not the only one. Genevieve Dieudonne and Penelope Churchward were in the galliard too, drawn in by Dracula and their other persistent ghost, Charles Beauregard. Dracula and Charles had left the floor, but the three vampire women still revolved around their absences, warily friends with each other because of loves and hates they shared.

When Francis killed the Count at the end of the movie - if that was the ending he went with - maybe it would be for the last time. You weren't truly dead until you'd died in a motion picture. Or at the box office.

The latest word was that the role was on offer to Marlon Brando. She couldn't see it: Stanley Kowalski and Vito Corleone as Count Dracula. One of the best actors in the world, he'd been one of the worst Napoleons in the movies. Historical characters brought out the ham in him. He was terrible as Fletcher Christian too.

Officially, Kate was still just a technical advisor. Though she had never actually met Dracula during his time in London, she had lived through the period. She had known Stoker, Jonathan Harker, Godalming and the rest. Once, as a warm girl, she had been terrified by Van Helsing's rages. When Stoker wrote his book and smuggled it out of prison, she had helped with its underground circulation, printing copies on the presses of the Pall Mall Gazette and ensuring its distribution despite all attempts at suppression. She wrote the introduction for the 1912 edition that was the first official publication.

Actually, she found herself impressed into a multitude of duties. Francis treated a $20 million (and climbing) movie like a college play and expected everyone to pitch in, despite union rules designed to prevent the crew being treated as slave labour. She found the odd afternoon of sewing costumes or night of set-building welcome distraction.

At first, Francis asked her thousands of questions about points of detail; now he was shooting, he was too wrapped up in his own vision to take advice. If she didn't find something to do, she'd sit idle. As an employee of Francis's studio, American Zoetrope, she couldn't even write articles about the shoot. For once, she was on the inside, knowing but not telling.

She had wanted to write about Romania for the New Statesman, but was under orders not to do anything that might jeopardise the co-operation the production needed from the Ceauescus. So far, she had avoided all the official receptions Nicolae and Elena had hosted for the production. The Premier was known to be an extreme vampire-hater, especially since the stirrings of the Transylvania Movement, and occasionally ordered not-so-discreet purges of the undead.

Kate knew she, like the few other vampires with the Dracula crew, was subject to regular checks by the Securitate. Men in black leather coats loitered in the corner of her eye.

'For God's sake,' Francis had told her, 'don't take anybody local.'

Like most Americans, he didn't understand. Though he could see she was a tiny woman with red hair and glasses, the mind of an aged aunt in the body of an awkward cousin, Francis could not rid himself of the impression that vampire women were ravening predators with unnatural powers of bewitchment, lusting after the pounding blood of any warm youth who happened along. She was sure he hung his door with garlic and wolfsbane, but half-hoped for a whispered solicitation.

After a few uncomfortable nights in Communist-approved beer halls, she had learned to stay in her hotel room while in Bucharest. People here had memories as long as her lifetime. They crossed themselves and muttered prayers as she walked by. Children threw stones.

She stood at her window and looked out at the square. A patch of devastation where the ancient quarter of the capital had been, marked the site of the palace Ceauescu was building for himself. A three-storey poster of the Saviour of Romania stood amid the ruins. Dressed like an orthodox priest, he held up Dracula's severed head as if he had personally killed the Count.

Ceauescu harped at length about the dark, terrible days of the past when Dracula and his kind preyed on the warm of Romania. In theory, it kept his loyal subjects from considering the dark, terrible days of the present when he and his wife lorded over the country like especially corrupt Roman Emperors. Impersonating the supplicant undertaker in The Godfather, Francis had abased himself to the dictator to secure official co-operation.

She turned the wireless on and heard tinny martial music. She turned it off, lay on the narrow, lumpy bed - as a joke, Fred Forrest and Francis had put a coffin in her room one night - and listened to the city at night. Like the forest, Bucharest was alive with noises and smells.

It was ground under, but there was life here. Even in this grim city, someone was laughing, someone was in love. Somebody was allowed to be a happy fool.

She heard winds in telephone wires, bootsteps on cobbles, a drink poured in another room, someone snoring, a violinist sawing scales. And someone outside her door. Someone who didn't breathe, who had no heartbeat, but whose clothes creaked as he moved, whose saliva rattled in his throat.

She sat up, confident she was elder enough to be silent, and looked at the door.

'Come in,' she said, 'it's not locked. But be careful. I can't afford more breakages.'

7.

His name was Ion Popescu and he seemed about thirteen, with big, olive-shiny orphan eyes and thick, black, unruly hair. He wore an adult's clothes, much distressed and frayed, stained with long-dried blood and earth. His teeth were too large for his skull, his cheeks stretched tight over his jaws, drawing his whole face to the point of his tiny chin.

Once in her room, he crouched down in a corner, away from the window. He talked only in a whisper, in a mix of English and German she had to strain to follow. His mouth wouldn't open properly. He was alone in the city, without community. Now he was tired and wanted to leave his homeland. He begged her to hear him out and whispered his story.

He claimed to be forty-five, turned in 1944. He didn't know, or didn't care to talk about, his father- or mother-in-darkness. There were blanks burned in his memory, whole years missing. She had come across that before. For all his vampire life, he had lived underground, under the Nazis and then the Communists. He was the sole survivor of several resistance movements. His warm comrades never really trusted him, but his capabilities were useful for a while.

She was reminded of her first days after turning. When she knew nothing, when her condition seemed a disease, a trap. That Ion could be a vampire for over thirty years and never pass beyond the new-born stage was incredible. She truly realised, at last, how backward this country was.

'Then I hear of the American film, and of the sweet vampire lady who is with the company. Many times, I try to get near you, but you are watched. Securitate. You, I think, are my saviour, my true mother-in-the-dark.'

Forty-five, she reminded herself.

Ion was exhausted after days trying to get close to the hotel, to 'the sweet vampire lady', and hadn't fed in weeks. His body was icy cold. Though she knew her own strength was low, she nipped her wrist and dribbled a little of her precious blood onto his white lips, enough to put a spark in his dull eyes.

There was a deep gash on his arm, which festered as it tried to heal. She bound it with her scarf, wrapping his thin limb tight.

He hugged her and slept like a baby. She arranged his hair away from his eyes and imagined his life. It was like the old days, when vampires were hunted down and destroyed by the few who believed. Before Dracula.

The Count had changed nothing for Ion Popescu.

8.

Bistritz, a bustling township in the foothills of the Carpathian Alps. Harker, carrying a Gladstone bag, weaves through crowds towards a waiting coach and six. Peasants try to sell him crucifixes, garlic and other lucky charms. Women cross themselves and mutter prayers.

A wildly gesticulating photographer tries to stop him, slowing his pace to examine a complicated camera. An infernal burst of flash-powder spills purple smoke across the square. People choke on it.

Corpses hang from a four-man gibbet, dogs leaping up to chew on their naked feet. Children squabble over mismatched boots filched from the executed men. Harker looks up at the twisted, mouldy faces.

He reaches the coach and tosses his bag up. SWALES, the coachman, secures it with the other luggage and growls at the late passenger. Harker pulls open the door and swings himself into the velvet-lined interior of the carriage.

There are two other passengers. WESTENRA, heavily moustached and cradling a basket of food. And MURRAY, a young man who smiles as he looks up from his Bible.

Harker exchanges curt nods of greeting as the coach lurches into motion.

HARKER's Voice: I quickly formed opinions of my travelling companions. Swales was at the reins. It was my commission but sure as shooting it was his coach. Westenra, the one they called 'Cook', was from Whitby. He was ratcheted several notches too tight for Wallachia. Probably too tight for Whitby, come to that. Murray, the fresh-faced youth with the Good Book, was a rowing blue from Oxford. To look at him, you'd think the only use he'd have for a sharpened stake would be as a stump in a knock-up match.

Later, after dark but under a full moon, Harker sits up top with Swales. A wind-up phonograph crackles out a tune through a sizable trumpet.

Mick Jagger sings 'Ta-Ra-Ra-BOOM-De-Ay'.

Westenra and Murray have jumped from the coach and ride the lead horses, whooping it up like a nursery Charge of the Light Brigade.

Harker, a few years past such antics, watches neutrally. Swales is indulgent of his passengers.

The mountain roads are narrow, precipitous. The lead horses, spurred by their riders, gallop faster. Harker looks down and sees a sheer drop of a thousand feet, and is more concerned by the foolhardiness of his companions.

Hooves strike the edge of the road, narrowly missing disaster.

Westenra and Murray chant along with the song, letting go of their mounts' manes and doing hand-gestures to the lyrics. Harker gasps but Swales chuckles. He has the reins and the world is safe.

HARKER's Voice: I think the dark and the pines of Romania spooked them badly, but they whistled merrily on into the night, infernal cake-walkers with Death as a dancing partner.

9.

In the rehearsal hall, usually a people's ceramics collective, she introduced Ion to Francis.

The vampire youth was sharper now. In a pair of her jeans (which fitted him perfectly) and a Godfather II T-shirt, he looked less the waif, more like a survivor. Her Biba scarf, now his talisman, was tied around his neck.

'I said we could find work for him with the extras. The gypsies.'

'I am no gypsy,' Ion said, vehemently.

'He speaks English, Romanian, German, Magyar and Romany. He can co-ordinate all of them.'

'He's a kid.'

'He's older than you are.'

Francis thought it over. She didn't mention Ion's problems with the authorities. Francis couldn't harbour an avowed dissident. The relationship between the production and the government was already strained. Francis thought (correctly) he was being bled of funds by corrupt officials, but couldn't afford to lodge a complaint. Without the Romanian army, he didn't have a cavalry, didn't have a horde. Without location permits that still hadn't come through, he couldn't shoot the story beyond Borgo Pass.

'I can keep the rabble in line, maestro,' Ion said, smiling.

Somehow, he had learned how to work his jaws and lips into a smile. With her blood in him, he had more control. She noticed him chameleoning. His smile, she thought, might be a little like hers.

Francis chuckled. He liked being called 'maestro'. Ion was good at getting on the right side of people. After all, he had certainly got on the right side of her.

'Okay, but keep out of the way if you see anyone in a suit.'

Ion was effusively grateful. Again, he acted his apparent age, hugging Francis, then her, saluting like a toy soldier. Martin Sheen, noticing, raised an eyebrow.

Francis took Ion off to meet his own children - Roman, Gio and Sofia - and Sheen's sons - Emilio and Charlie. It had not sunk in that this wiry kid, obviously keen to learn baseball and chew gum, was in warm terms middle-aged.

Then again, Kate never knew whether to be twenty-five, the age at which she turned, or 116. And how was a 116-year-old supposed to behave anyway?

Since she had let him bleed her, she was having flashes of his past: scurrying through back-streets and sewers, like a rat; the stabbing pains of betrayal; eye-searing flashes of firelight; constant cold and red thirst and filth.

Ion had never had the time to grow up. Or even to be a proper child. He was a waif and a stray. She couldn't help but love him a little. She had chosen not to pass on the Dark Kiss, though she had once, during the Great War, come close and regretted it.

Her bloodline, she thought, was not good for a new-born. There was too much Dracula in it, maybe too much Kate Reed.

To Ion, she was a teacher not a mother. Before she insisted on becoming a journalist, her whole family seemed to feel she was predestined to be a governess. Now, at last, she thought she saw what they meant.

Ion was admiring six-year-old Sofia's dress, eyes bright with what Kate hoped was not hunger. The little girl laughed, plainly taken with her new friend. The boys, heads full of the vampires of the film, were less sure about him. He would have to earn their friendship.

Later, Kate would deal with Part Two of the Ion Popescu Problem. After the film was over, which would not be until the 1980s at the current rate of progress, he wanted to leave the country, hidden in among the production crew. He was tired of skulking and dodging the political police, and didn't think he could manage it much longer. In the West, he said, he would be free from persecution.

She knew he would be disappointed. The warm didn't really like vampires in London or Rome or Dublin any more than they did in Timioara or Bucharest or Cluj. It was just more difficult legally to have them destroyed.

10.

Back in the mountains, there was the usual chaos. A sudden thunderstorm, whipped up out of nowhere like a djinn, had torn up real and fake trees and scattered them throughout the valley, demolishing the gypsy encampment production designer Dean Tavoularis had been building. About half a million dollars' worth of set was irrevocably lost. The bunker itself had been struck by lightning and split open like a pumpkin. Steady rain poured in and streamed out of the structure, washing away props, documents, equipment and costumes. Crews foraged in the valley for stuff that could be reclaimed and used.

Francis acted as if God were personally out to destroy him.

'Doesn't anybody else notice what a disaster this film is?' he shouted. 'I haven't got a script, I haven't got an actor, I'm running out of money, I'm all out of time. This is the goddamned Unfinished Symphony, man.'

Nobody wanted to talk to the director when he was in this mood. Francis squatted on the bare earth of the mountainside, surrounded by smashed balsawood pine trees, hugging his knees. He wore a Stetson hat, filched from Quincey Morris's wardrobe. Drizzle ran from its brim in a tiny stream. Eleanor, his wife, concentrated on keeping the children out of the way.

'This is the worst fucking film of my career. The worst I'll ever make. The last movie.'

The first person to tell Francis to cheer up and that things weren't so bad would get fired and be sent home. At this point, crowded under a leaky lean-to with other surplus persons, Kate was tempted.

'I don't want to be Orson Welles,' Francis shouted at the slate-grey skies, rain on his face, 'I don't want to be David Lean. I just want to make an Irwin Allen movie, with violence, action, sex, destruction in every frame. This isn't art, this is atrocity.'

Just before the crew left Bucharest, as the storm was beginning, Marlon Brando had consented to be Dracula. Francis personally wired him a million-dollar down-payment against two weeks' work. Nobody dared remind Francis that if he wasn't ready to shoot Brando's scenes by the end of the year, he would lose the money and his star.

The six months was up, and barely a quarter of the film was in the can. The production schedule had been extended and reworked so many times that all forecasts of the end of shooting were treated like forecasts of the end of the War. Everyone said it would be over by Christmas, but knew it would stretch until the last trump.

'I could just stop, you know,' Francis said, deflated. 'I could just shut it down and go back to San Francisco and a hot bath and decent pasta and forget everything. I can still get work shooting commercials, nudie movies, series TV. I could make little films, shot on video with a four-man crew, and show them to my friends. All this D.W. Griffith-David O. Selznick shit just isn't fucking necessary.'

He stretched out his arms and water poured from his sleeves. Over a hundred people, huddled in various shelters or wrapped in orange plastic ponchos, looked at their lord and master and didn't know what to say or do.