Chapter 24: want/need
By CollinsKid
^.^.^
sometimes the things you most wish for are not to be touched.
- 'into the woods (1987) '
^.^.^
(Voice-Over(s): (Alexandra Moltke): I want...
(Jonathan Frid): I want her back. (Lara Parker): I want him dead. (Grayson
Hall): I want to help him. (David Selby): I want to be absolved. (Joan Bennett): I want to hold her.
(Humbert Allan Astredo): I want power. (Kathryn Leigh Scott): I want what I'm
worth. (Nancy Barrett): I want to kill everyone.
(Louis Edmonds): I want what I deserve. (David Henesy): I want my mother.
(Denise Nickerson): I want my brother. (Don Briscoe): I want to die.
(Alexandra Moltke): My name is Victoria Winters.
(Lara Parker): I want him back. (Grayson Hall): I want him to love me. (David
Selby): I want her to know I didn't mean it. (Jonathan Frid): I want the past.
(Alexandra Moltke): I want...)
^.^.^
miss winters dreams again (littlemother)
all the children of your children's children ...did you ever think what they're
going to find?
- peter gabriel, 'make tomorrow'
(her foot slipped on the lip of the rock, and she fell again)
The wood doors slammed open -- an organic membrane of some sinister, dark wet
orifice, the place where real stopped and fever began. In here it was
different and she was in the drawing room. The lights were up and blaring
misty blue. Fire roared in the fireplace. Sound waves -- roiling sonic oceans
-- something strange, something Edgard Varese played on the record player
('Poeme Electronique') . The windows, though open and suffused with a roaring
wind, made not a sound as petals from flowers from the prize Collins garden
blew in like waves -- pink, green, blue, orange, gold.
And then there they *were* -- Mrs. Stoddard and Mr. Collins, wineglasses in
hand, and beyond them, a smaller, younger figure, huddled in the shadows by the
fire.
Brother and sister turned in unison as Vicki approached. "Why, hello, Miss
Winters," Roger purred, cutting a drunken, courtly bow.
"Winter," Elizabeth mused drolly. "What a vicious time of year." She eyed her
red wine with an air of melancholy.
"Mrs. Stoddard, Mr. Collins," Vicki began dazedly. "Was there a party? Did
I miss it?"
"That's the thing about you," Maggie Evans, hair ebony and bobbed, hissed out
from behind the couch, where she crouched like a black cat, head poking out
from behind the side. "You don't miss a trick. *You* can reach around his
sides, can't you?"
"I feel sorry for you," Vicki protested feebly, face blanching with guilt and
sympathy.
"Don't you look at me," Maggie snarled, purple mouth curling into a horrid
line. "I don't want your eyes."
A monstrous claw reached out from next to Maggie, under the couch, and before
Vicki could peer at it, Maggie laced her fingers into its misshapen digits and
let herself be pulled back behind the couch.
Vicki looked back up at Mrs. Stoddard and Mr. Collins. "What *is* that down
there?"
"What's what where now?" Roger asked with befuddlement. He raised his
wineglass to his lips, but looked down into it to see that it was bone-dry and
empty. A look of horror crossed his gentleman face.
Vicki crossed to the couch and knelt down to the floor, crawling behind it --
but Maggie wasn't there, nor any strange monster. However, as Vicki rounded
the side of the couch, she ran smack-dab into a young girl, also on her hands
and knees. The girl wore a simple but expensive white-lilac dress, with
diaphanous puffy shoulders. Her face was porcelain and delicate, her lips just
slightly rouged with some sort of black liner. Her eyes were huge opals, and
her raven hair was in a 1920's bob with a bow. She was maybe fourteen,
fifteen, but looked younger. like a doll, Vicki thought.
"Hello," the girl chirped brightly.
"Hello," Vicki said softly.
The girl winced, then brightened with carefully artificialized cheer. "Are you
here for Lizzie's thing? Not to be awful; she's my sister but *such* a corpse.
*I'm* the life of the ball."
"Who are you?"
"I'm the hothouse flower," the girl said with an aching sadness. "I break.
It's my condition."
"What condition?"
The girl's legs parted slightly. "Do you really think these hips can do the
job?" she said in a choked whisper, face starting to crumble.
Vicki reached out to her --
"And I did nothing," Mrs. Stoddard said in a breaking, dead voice. Vicki's
head snapped up to look at her from behind the couch. The wineglass broke in
Mrs. Stoddard's hand, and Vicki realized it had been full of dark arterial
blood.
Vicki turned back to look at the girl, but the girl was gone.
She rose from behind the couch and looked at the window, the wind still spewing
petals. She crossed over to the window and the curtains, and jumped back as she
came face-to-face with Carolyn, crouching behind a drape.
"Carolyn," Vicki said.
There was a bloody scalpel in Carolyn's hands and blood on her dress. Her hair
was wild, her eyes glittered with a feverish kind of intensity. "Did anyone
see you come in here?" she hissed with more than a trace of a French commoner's
accent.
"No," Vicki said warily. "No, I don't think so -- "
"*Be sure,*" the thing with Carolyn's face snarled, scalpel pressed against
Vicki's chest.
"No," Vicki said again, standing her ground, swallowing hard.
Carolyn's hand fell away. "Are there still heads in the streets? Those men
with their steel? Oh, I know steel, I assure you -- but I refuse to let it
know me."
"I'm not sure I understand you," Vicki said.
"Fool!" Carolyn hissed, raising the scalpel again, making Vicki step back. "I
did not die. I still make my own rules."
Vicki moved away from the curtains and stepped back into the main drawing room
-- and nearly ran into Cassandra. Except Cassandra was on the floor on her
hands and knees too, teeth bared and jagged, slinking around like a cat,
circling two small figures: David and poor little Amy Jennings from the farm.
The two were hastily unwrapping a huge package with pink wrapping paper and red
ribbon. Vicki stared, completely stymied.
David looked up from beneath a mop of brandy hair, pink scars on his neck still
fading. "I want it!" he whined, tearing at the paper like mad.
"I need it!" Amy chimed in, ripping and tearing. Still it was wrapped.
"What's in there?" Vicki asked.
"I told you not to open that until Christmas," Mrs. Stoddard called from
across the room.
"We want to see," the children chorused.
"No, you don't," the older woman said.
Julia Hoffman was at the nightstand, clutching it like a rock as so many seemed
to. She was crying inconsolably. Vicki went to her. "Doctor Hoffman..."
"Go away," the doctor said, head bowed. "I don't need your pity."
"What do you need?"
"That," Julia said through her tears, "is something completely different."
Barnabas and Quentin were standing in the doorway. Vicki went to him, and the
two moved around her, circling her in opposite directions, much like Cassandra
on the floor -- hunter and prey. Vicki had to twirl around to keep up with
them.
"I want you," Barnabas said.
"I need you," Quentin said.
"I think we get the point," Cassandra snarled from her slinking position on the
floor.
"You make me alive," Quentin breathed.
"You make her alive," Barnabas whispered.
"This is too unbelievable," Julia murmured in abject misery, readying an
injection.
"I can't possibly get out of this, can I?" Vicki said, struggling to escape the
two men circling her.
"I gave in to the fire and the tambourines," Quentin said softly. "I lost
everything. But I can *touch* you -- and you can purify me."
"I don't want to do that," Vicki quavered.
"I'll never know if she fell or jumped," Barnabas countered, "I had everything,
I had love, I had a future. You have her heart. And I want it."
"You can't have it," Vicki protested.
"What is it you *want,* *Vicki?*" Cassandra snapped, still prowling around the
children on her hands and knees. Between them, the giant present had become a
black box, and the red ribbon had bled down into a crimson pool of blood.
"I don't know what I want," Vicki said.
"Look behind you," Cassandra simpered with an evil smirk.
Vicki turned back to the grinning Quentin. In his hands he held the portrait
of a monstrously deformed, ancient grotesque of a man.
She whirled around and Barnabas stood there, fangs bared, blood on his mouth.
Vicki screamed. A baby cried.
The doors closed.
house by the sea (qui etes-vous, maggie evans?) :WANT
what's this you say? you feel the right to remain? then stay and i will bury
you.
what's that you say? your father's spirit still lives in this place? well, i
will silence you.
- The Dave Matthews Band, "Don't Drink The Water"
and whatever walked there, walked alone.
- Shirley Jackson, 'The Haunting of Hill House'
Seaview.
There it was, the grandeur wreck. Symbol of a vaporized bourgeoise. Even in
decomposition it looked too rich for Margaret Evans' pauper's blood.
It was late afternoon on that gray, rainy Thursday, and Maggie was standing by
her shoddy little car -- the annoying relic of the ashes of her home life;
Nicholas had promised a new one -- and staring up from the pit of earth and rock at the end of the bumpy, ancient-paved winding path that twisted away from Collinsport proper and
towards a decrepit, untended end of the shoreline. It was just her, the house,
the car, the path, and beyond that, the dervish sea, full of whitewave today --
kept threatening to storm since Saturday and old Ezra Hearn now said it was to
happen today or tomorrow -- and the gray, overcast sky.
No sun.
Amidst this misty cloudland, Maggie faced off against the monarch's graveyard.
Zipped up tight in a lavender minidress with only the gauziest of sleeves,
Maggie's newly-midnight hair whipped in the sea winds, biting at her alabaster
skin. Her face didn't change; it remained set and determined, staring at the
house like a cowboy in a gunfight.
The house itself was really an epic historical document on the old Collins
craftsmanship -- a huge, overly expansive front, full of gaping window-eyes that bore down on
the visitor who dared enter. The doors were armored, ornate closed bat-wings.
The rust-colored brick/stone walls had now really more than begun to rust; they
stood covered in mud, moss, rot, even graffiti from local kids and the
occasional stoner. The garden just outside was insanely overgrown, with plants
and dead, mutated flowers rising up like monstrous tendrils; a miniature forest
of the condemned. It was a multicolored, brown-rotted mass that made the path
to the doors extremely interesting and difficult.
And high at the top, rising above like a single demon's horn -- the
turret-tower, looming over it all, with its single dirty, broken glass eye.
It doesn't scare me, Maggie thought. Oh, it had when she was a child -- to
this day dares were entertained by the local youth to go within haunting
distance of Seaview. Once, when she was nine, Maggie had gotten caught in that
Where The Wild Things Are garden after taking up Joey Haskell and the late,
great Tom Jennings on a dare that included the promise of all the boys' pooled
little army men (even then, Maggie Evans had opted to think different) . She'd
gotten an ankle and an arm wrapped around some thornbushes and a tentacle of
weed and had fallen and screamed and screamed and screamed until the two
contrite boys finally pulled her out. She'd come home with skinned knees and
cut, bleeding ankle and arm and her mother had told off both Joe and Tom and
then Maggie herself, who got first a grounding and then Bactine (and later, to
be fair, Irish tea and some cookies) . But that was then; now was now and
Maggie certainly did live in the now. This rotted old corpse of a house was
just a lot of wood and stone and supports, and it was what Nicholas had wanted
-- a place he could make a castle of, and a place where he could stand on the
mountain of his sins.
Maggie slung her new purse over her shoulder and spike-heel klick-klakked
through the overgrown garden towards the front doors. The weeds, the
thornbushes were large and perversely difficult to navigate. Maggie felt
prickly-pears and thorns rake at her legs but refused to acknowledge it,
choosing to press on. When the weeds rose to her chest she drew in a solid,
whooping breath of growing fear and charged through the rest, leaping for the
doors and slamming into the old iron things with a hard thud. She looked back
at the garden with a mixture of contempt and concern. And just like nine years
old -- barb-wire legs.
Maggie retrieved the skeleton key from her purse, put it into the lock of the
doors. Stared up at them one more time, with gnawing disease. They really did
look like some demon thing's caul, the last curtain to be thrown open --
(!stop it!)
Maggie turned the key, and pushed.
She was inside.
The front hall was dark, badly lit with a single oil lamp flickering somehow,
still. Faint light from the sea windows at the very dark end of the corridor.
A staircase leading to a dark upperfloors. A rusted, scratched golden-framed
mirror. An old-style coat rack. Several portals to the other rooms.
Everything was covered in the same ratty old red velvet carpeting -- stained
with water, time, filth, it lent a squatters' impression to everything inside.
The oil lamp (WHO had lit that?!) swung in the wind, flickering. Maggie shut
the door behind her quietly.
As she entered the drawing room -- ugly, slashed-up couch; interesting sea view
window ("Seaview," ha ha, funny, Maggie) ; more oil lamps and a fireplace --
Maggie thought back to what she knew of the place. Seaview, a.k.a. "that
house by the sea" to the uninitiated, was in fact another Collins estate
(didn't it just figure -- but no wonder Nicholas wanted it) . It, however, had
been closed down in the 1800s by a Caleb Collins after various ghastly deeds.
Said Caleb ordered Seaview sealed for a hundred years, and then it could only
be occupied by a Collins for another ten years. Nicholas was close to that
deadline, but Maggie was sure he had some legal loophole in his magic bag.
It had all started, apparently, around 1845 -- when Gregory Collins had lived
in the place, with his wife and their eight (!) children, aged six to fourteen.
Gregory had been a man of brutish things -- foxhunts, bloodletting; he was
something of a beginner's sadist. It had apparently always been in his makeup,
much like his father. Gregory Collins had, as the story went, taken much of
his pent-up, irrational rage out on said children. After years of this
physical, mental, and emotional torture, Gregory Collins had droven his
children mad, and they murdered him and his wife, their mother. As a group.
Together. In packs.
After that, Seaview had fallen into disarray. It had been three months before
anyone knew about Gregory and his wife. And in those three months the Seaview
children had lived and reigned there, making the stately manor some sort of
Romper Room madhouse, Lord Of The Flies-style. Occasionally, it was said, packs
of them would venture into the village and pick off an adult, or another child.
These murders remained unsolved until the Seaview children were finally found
out, and a cache of bodies young and old were found in the basement, in the
tower, in the fireplace. This came to pass when Caleb, Gregory's brother,
arrived on the scene and learned the horrific truth. He was the one that made
the decision to have them all killed by poison and fire, and he was the one who
supervised their bodies being carried out of the house one by one. Thereafter,
he sealed it, not making much noise about just what had happened to Gregory
Collins (for Caleb was among the few who knew just how much of a beast his
brother was, and saw it all as perhaps for the best) , and walked away.
And there it had stayed.
Even to this day, it was said by the local kids and old-timers alike that the
ghosts of those Seaview kids could still be seen roaming through the fog --
capering on the shoreline near the house or playing sick games of hide & seek
in the garden; scampering through the woods; lingering on the path back to
town. None of them went out there. And Maggie in fact hadn't since her
childhood, until this day.
It was the eyes that struck her first -- that was when Maggie jumped a bit and
saw the old, tattered oil painting, adorned with cuts and scratches, of Gregory
Collins above the fireplace. Large, stately man for a large stately house;
thick bear's beard, barrell chest. Virile. Imposing. Insane. And the more
chilling aspect; at his waist and knees, surrounding him, his eight children,
tricked out in their finery, each wearing the same pale, neutral blind sibyl
face.
She shuddered, and forced herself to turn away. Looked around the old room.
It would suit him -- he'd said he'd liked the decaying grandeur of it all when he'd first seen
it, and that it seemed "an exceptionally perfect home for me."
But still, beneath her new shell, Maggie couldn't help but be adversely
affected by the place. It made her flesh crawl and her teeth ache -- something
in it, some living force suffusing the lights, the furniture, the air -- was
that stuffiness that of a closed tomb or of something more? She looked up at
the portrait, and she sweared she could see the nine pairs of eyes boring into
her, like lasers --
Maggie clenched her fists, lifted her feet, and stomped out of the living room
and back down the hallway. No. This was Nicholas' place now, his castle, and
it was up to her to make it ready. She looked down the long hall, and saw a
darkened, immense dining room. Down there, things echoed in the wind.
Unafraid and defiant, Maggie walked towards the dark void. She'd make this
Nicholas' place, oh yes. His and hers. And once they had whatever kindergeist
remained here would fly to the seven winds and never return again. And after
that, Nicholas would weave his grand vicious plan, and they would rip that
other house on the hill apart.
The dark swallowed her up.
*/*/*
one malevolent cell (i believe someone can love him as he is) :WANT
The clouds began to part.
Julia sat on an ivory bench in the middle of the garden, not too far from the
veranda, staring up at the gray sky, finally starting to ready itself for the
rain. She didn't know whether she'd stay out or go in. She didn't think it
mattered very much at all.
She had begun to outlive her usefulness -- more than begun. Barnabas was a
human man. She had no work. But she did have a fantastic set of fang marks on
her neck that came from the monster maw of the thing that still despite it all
claimed to be named Cassandra Blair Collins. The trophy wife gone mad now slept
in a mauve tomb in the East Wing, not privy to this stormy day. And whenever
she pleased, she could use Julia as her agent du jour, and command her to
perform any ghastly act she so desired. And Julia would do it. I have no
mouth and I must scream, Julia thought faintly.
With Barnabas human and very much interested in Victoria Winters, Julia's only
thought to the future had been to leave -- go back to Wyndcliffe, or visit New
York again, or something. That thought was now amplified a thousandfold. Could
she get away from Cassandra? Would Cassandra find her?
Her thoughts had also recently turned to her own condition and what she could
do about it. Julia's experimentation and eventual cure of Barnabas had been
based around the belief that there was one, single malevolent cell, breeding
this lifedeath virus that made him a vampire. And that belief had been proven
right. If Julia could cure the dead man, couldn't she cure herself? Did she
want to?
The fact was, however, that being Cassandra's part-time lapdog was not weighing
heavily on Julia's mind at all; if anything it seemed an afterthought. Her
mind was fixated on her own current uselessness -- she had, literally, no place
to be and nothing to do. And she hated it.
The leaves ruffled, and the worst possible person stepped out of the
foliage: Barnabas Collins himself. Careless autumn hair; deep black eyes. She
still loved the sight of him. He saw her, and cut a courtly bow. "Julia," he
said. "What are you doing out here all alone?"
"Hello, Barnabas," Julia said in a heavy, crumpling voice. "How are you?"
"I'm well, thank you," he said, drawing closer. "And you, Julia?"
"I'm tolerable," she said, pawing at an errant leaf and twirling it absently in
between two fingers. An errant drop of rain, the first of the day, hit its
papery skin.
"Julia, I must talk to you," Barnabas said, sitting down unasked. "It's
about...Victoria."
oh CHRIST, Julia thought, but swallowed a wave of bile. "Victoria?"
"She has grown distant, distracted," Barnabas mused. "Perhaps it is her search
for her lineage, the recent troubles -- I can't be sure what. But we are
drifting on opposite winds, and that cannot continue."
"I see," Julia said lifelessly.
"She is the very soul of Josette," Barnabas continued, unaware that Julia was
now lip-synching him without even having to look. "She is the heart of her.
It is as though we have finally gotten our second chance. I cannot let it slip
away, I cannot let *her* slip away -- but she is."
"She's not yours," Julia muttered.
Barnabas cocked an ear and an eyebrow. "I'm sorry, Julia, what did you say?"
"I said, she's not yours," Julia repeated, with more emphasis on the last
words. "Josette du Pres was, but Victoria Winters isn't. And she's never
going to be. It's not the way she's built. She has a life, Barnabas; she
wasn't raised like an aristocratic china doll. She lived in an orphanage that
struggled to stay afloat for the past twenty years; I've checked. She saw
children die; saw kids get shuffled from abusive foster home to foster home.
Josette du Pres' world was plantations and tropics and only the finest things;
Vicki Winters' world was and is survive-any-way-you-can. She's smarter than
Josette, she's more mature than Josette, and she is not in love with you."
Barnabas was stricken. "Julia, I've never heard you talk like this," he said
hoarsely. "Surely you don't think -- "
"She can tell where you belong, just like I can," Julia continued, eyes
brimming with fire. "Age and time happen for a reason, Barnabas. You just
cheated the wheel. Now you're a relic -- and people know it. Vicki doesn't
want the past, she wants the present. She doesn't want you."
Barnabas bowed his head. "Then who does she want?" he mumbled sullenly.
Julia pursed her lips. "I'm sure I don't know."
Barnabas drew up his cloak like a shield, stood with cane in hand. "I shall
see her tonight," he said quietly. "We're going to take a walk near Widows
Hill. Then, if she does not wish my company, let her say it herself."
"Yes, let her," Julia said wanly.
Barnabas' eyes fixed her, and his brows knitted. "Julia, you've never spoken
this way about Victoria or Josette," he said. "Are you sure you're well?"
"As well as can be expected," Julia said in a dead little voice. "Fine. Walk
with her, Barnabas." Then, she turned away.
After a few minutes, he walked away.
Julia bit back the tears brimming in her eyes. No, she wasn't well -- but it
wasn't Cassandra's influence that had made her say what she did.
She'd meant it all. And Barnabas would know the facts soon. Because Julia had
believed every word.
*/*/*
i hate you:WANT
David's eyes were laser-like, staring at Vicki from his spot lying on the bed.
At the desk, Vicki sat grading his book report.
He stared and stared, intense and brooding. Thinking. Dissecting.
Deconstructing. Seething. In the closet, all his toy guns and robots and
monsters were in a big bin and not to be touched until SHE finished. And David
didn't like that one bit.
"Are you *finished?*" he snapped.
Vicki, unusually haggard and tense, looked up at David, giving him an
admonishing look. "I would be if you didn't ask every three minutes," she
said. "Relax, David."
"I don't want to relax," David groused. "*You're* not relaxed."
"I'm perfectly fine."
"I don't think so." David flipped up, then crawled across the bed to clutch the
posts, watching her from his kneeling, mid-pounce stance/spot. "Something's
eating at you. Eating away, like those fire ants I saw under a rock. What's
eating *you,* *Miss* Winters?"
"Nothing at all, David," Vicki said tersely. "I really don't know what you're
on about. Now I have to finish grading this -- "
"Is it Cousin Barnabas?" David asked suddenly. "Or is it Quentin?" He relished
seeing Vicki bolt upright and shoot him a look, and that fueled his voyeuristic
glee, which spread across his elf's face like a virus. "Or both of them.
That's it, isn't it?"
"David, Quentin is very nice but I am not interested in him," Vicki said. "And
your cousin Barnabas and I are just friends. We're *all* just friends."
"*Sure,*" David said. "Carolyn says that all the time. It usually means she's
*kissing* the guy."
"*David!*"
"So are you kissing *both of them?*" David theorized with a tone of
incredulity. "Or taking turns? Or what is it? I don't know, Miss Winters -- "
Vicki's brain was bleeding with migraine. "David, I'm not going to discuss
this with you," she sighed, hand to temple.
"Well, which one d'you want?" David asked with shrugging palms. "Which one of
'em do you *need,* *oh* *so* *much* that it HURRRTTTSSS -- " David broke from
his melodrama posing to burst into a fit of giggles and collapse back onto the
bed.
"DAVID!" Vicki leapt from her chair. "That's enough. Please just quiet down
so I can finish this, or it's no dessert for you tonight."
David pouted. "Fine," he growled, flopping back onto the bed. "Just trying to
help you sort it *alllll* out."
"It doesn't need sorting out," Vicki said softly, feeling sick.
"Do you know what you want, Miss Winters?" David asked.
Vicki rolled her eyes, sighed, and relented. "I like to think I do," she said.
"I think everyone likes to. Do you?"
"I want my mother," David said simply.
Exasperated:"What about what you *need,* David, do you know anything about
that?"
David glared at her, eyes and nose flared, and gripped the bedposts like a
caged animal. "How about you, Miss Winters; d'you know whatcha need?"
Of course not.
*/*/*
oshden (rakosi) :NEED
(and then there they were...)
Quentin breathed that biting, antiseptic fall air into his lungs and saw the
triangle; saw the fire; saw his wife and her sister
(jenny and magda)
crooking their hands into pagan's signs and Magda clucking her tongue like a
serpent. He saw gypsies twirling spastically in singular vortexes, like
dervishes; he saw himself, in the center of a gypsy circle, his head contorting
into a shaggy wolf's head with a maw of gore-stained teeth; he saw a field of
white flowers bloom and the moon explode; he saw
(vicki)
And then, Quentin saw Fenn-Gibbons and the fire again, and Magda holding up her
hand full of blood, and he opened his eyes.
Quentin exhaled raggedly as he sat there, amidst the trees in the woods. Not
Oshden, but close -- a mystical center if there ever had been in 1897. So much
had happened between these trees. He'd paid for his pride, and he'd taken down
so many with him. And now here he was again, less than a hundred years later,
though he'd swore he'd stay away forever. Fool.
It was all happening again, of course. Miranda was back; he was back; the old
players had new faces and new names. He'd wanted so much to believe David was
Jamison, but couldn't allow himself that delusion -- that would lead to certain
madness.
Everyone back again, for another turn of the wheel. Everyone but Jenny...
...and Beth.
"Quentin."
Quentin ignored what he thought was a flitting apparition behind a tree, and
turned to see Eliot Stokes -- standing there, framed by branches. Stokes' face
was somber, understanding.
"I expected I'd find you here."
Quentin smiled wearily. "Come on in, Eliot. The fire's fine."
"I suppose I will," Eliot said, and stepped forward to Quentin's side. "How
are you holding up?"
"Oh, splendidly," Quentin said. "It's hard enough remembering it all
without...days like this. Days where the veil seems so thin."
"You mean the veil between life and death, past and present," Eliot said.
"So perceptive," Quentin marveled drolly. "Yes, that's what I mean. You get
your Ph.D, Professor."
"I already got it," Eliot remarked dryly. He surveyed the place, looking upon
it with studious eyes. "So I suppose this spot has some significance."
"Just another one of the old stomping grounds of the Animal That Walked Like A
Man," Quentin replied. "This was an important place to the gypsies, though,
especially the clan Rakosi."
"Was this where Magda -- ?" Stokes trailed off, realizing his bluntness.
Quentin rubbed his eyes. "I don't know," he said sorrowfully. "I wasn't
there. I just know what came next."
Eliot got to the point. "So you've found quite a lovely interest in the
governess. Victoria Winters?"
"How'd you find out about that? Never mind; I don't want to know," Quentin
groaned. "I couldn't begin to tell you the first thing about me and Vicki. We
were mad enough to notice each other, then mad enough to get together
and...hurt Maggie."
"Ah, yes, the unsinkable Miss Evans," Stokes said. "And how is she?"
"I think she's sunk," Quentin murmured gloomily. "Evan -- Blair -- has her.
He's got some scheme, and he's got his hooks into her. She's his black bride.
Siphoning her pain to use her for whatever end he wants." Quentin's hands
curled into fists. "I'll kill that wretched bastard," he hissed.
"Well, one vow of destruction at a time," Eliot quipped. "Are you and Miss
Winters still rendezvousing, then?"
"Supposedly," Quentin said. "Depends on who you ask. I think it's the end of
her and me, but at the same time -- we certainly don't seem to know how to
stop. We kissed once, Eliot; once. It might as well never happen again."
"But...?"
"But," Quentin said grudgingly, "we still seem to keep coming up next to each
other. I can't avoid her forever. You'd think I'd learned after all of it,
but I haven't. That's my greatest folly. I suppose we are starting to love
each other a bit. Bully for us."
"Are you in love with her?"
Out of the corner of his eye, Quentin saw a shape -- a phantom shard of his
mind, a little girl that looked so very much like Amy and Nora, clad in gypsy's
rags, skipping around the trees, throwing herbs from a basket of those magical
roots...
Quentin bowed his dark head. "Yes," he whispered. "Of course."
He closed his eyes, and Beth was there -- blond, radiant, eyes alive, face
still carved out of ice and porcelain.
(i love you. but i'll kill you if i have to.)
Quentin opened his eyes. "I need her, Eliot," he said. "Something in me needs
her, just like needing Beth. I don't know what to do."
"Start with not doing anything," Stokes said.
Quentin licked his lips. "She ought to get away from me."
They sat there for a long time.
*/*/*
rise (loosed) :NEED
hang ten honey i'm gonna go where she goes...
- Tori Amos
They were walking along the cliff of the Hill, and there was a deadly,
implacable silence. Neither of them said too much. Vicki felt uncomfortable;
Barnabas felt foolish. They'd exchanged pleasant small talk on the way up, but
now, here above the waves, there seemed to be a immense bullshit filter and a
stripping-away of the dishonesties. They sensed a sinking feeling.
Barnabas took up arms. "This girl you said you saw," he began. "You have no
idea who she was?"
"None," Vicki said, grateful for something to say. "I've looked and looked
through old history books, and nothing. But I feel she *has* to have been of a
Collins."
"What branch, I wonder?"
"Here, I think," Vicki said. "She wasn't from Europe; she had an American
dialect to her voice. Very young. Her hair was bobbed; she smelled
like...plums, I think...something like that."
"How strange," Barnabas mused. "A spirit appearing to you."
"Do you really believe that it was?"
"I do," Barnabas said. "I believe in...spirits. I believe they exist beyond
death."
Barnabas turned to the lip of the cliff. "You know, they say that on nights
like this, the line between the living and the dead is very blurred, very
indistinct -- as if shades could pass through the veil effortlessly. Perhaps
your ghost is out here, on the waves, with the Widows. I've heard tell that if
the women of the village call out on nights such as this, they can reach their
dead men in some sort of sign."
"I'm sure that's just an old wives' tale," Vicki said, laughing cautiously.
But something nagged at her
--
"Would you care to try it?" Barnabas asked. He gestured grandly to the edge of
the Hill, a sly smile playing on his lips.
Vicki shook her head. "I wouldn't begin to know what to say."
"Then I shall do it for you," Barnabas said, turning to the dark sky.
"Oh, Barnabas, don't," Vicki said, rising up to his side. "Let's not play at
parlor tricks. Let's just enjoy the night."
"Is that really what you want?" Barnabas asked. His face seemed pale,
unabashedly honest in the light. There was something Vicki sighted in his
eyes, and with a quiet horror she realized she saw it in herself -- fear, and
deep insecurity and uncertainty about this trip. Were they there? Were they
there together? If not, as who with who? Whose hand would be overplayed
first?
(he can't know, she thought. he can't. he deserves better.)
Vicki swallowed. "I don't know what I want," she admitted. "But I know what I
need, and that's not to ruin this evening, or hurt you."
"You could never hurt me," Barnabas said softly, but she knew he was lying.
"And you need to find this spirit, too, don't you?"
Vicki took a deep breath. "Yes," she said finally. "I do. I don't know why;
I can't explain it rationally. But I do, intensely."
"Then let's try it," Barnabas said. He turned back to the cliff, and with a
straightening of shoulders, looked for all the world like a condemned man,
falling into the abyss.
His eyes glowed. "Spirits of the afterlife," he called out, "spirits beyond
this mortal coil, beyond the moon and the sea and the night, hear us. Hear our
call, our plaintive plea, and respond, for we seek one of your number, on this
night of night's where the curtain is torn. One of you has appeared to one of
us. She has come to seek you out. Oblige her, if you will, and appear --
tell your sad poem and find justice on this strange eve! Rise, and answer our
call!"
The wind screamed and the waves howled, but Barnabas stepped back from the
ledge, and there was nothing -- just a deafening buzz. Barnabas sighed.
"Perhaps I was wrong."
"No," Vicki shook her head. "No, you weren't. I'm going to try."
With that, Vicki stepped forward. "If there is someone out there," she called.
"No...I know you're there. I know you can see me. You were in my room, in
that house on the hill. You're murdering my sleep, because you want something
from me or you want me to know something about you. I can see your eyes; I can
smell your scent. You'll never have a better chance than right now. So take
it. Take it, and appear! I won't be so foolishly daring again. Take the
chance, and let me see you -- now."
For a moment, nothing happened. Vicki stepped back, sighed, and bowed her
shaking head. Just then, the moon lit up to an obscenely huge spotlight on the
duo, and the two stepped back, shocked. A shrieking, unnatural siren flooded
their ears, and in that moonlight a figure materialized -- a figure with two
huge, fairy's eyes and a dark bob of hair.
Louise Collins hovered in the air just off Widows Hill, right before Barnabas
and Vicki's shocked eyes.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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