Shadows on the Wall Chapter 86

CHAPTER 86:  In This World and Any Other

by Nicky

(Voiceover by Don Briscoe):  “Collinwood, in the disturbing world of Parallel Time ... a world Barnabas Collins has been able to enter via a warp in time.  But though the faces and names are familiar, the relationships have changed.  And Barnabas finds himself a stranger in a sea of familiar faces.  And on this night, while Barnabas rages against the monster inside him, his best friend must come to a frightening and potentially deadly decision.”

1

             It was impossible, but she had seen it.  The room had changed back right in front of her eyes.  But can you really trust your eyes, Julia Hoffman asked herself, in this  house, this town?  Can you?  Can anyone?

            “Barnabas,” she whispered.  She stood inside the room now:  deserted, laden with spiderwebs, the air stale and dank.  A whisper of air danced across her cheek, an icy fingertip.  She shuddered.

            But he had been here.  She had seen him.

            And then he was gone.

            Get him back, Doctor.

            That wasn’t really Tom, wasn’t really Vicki.  They weren’t even ghosts, she was certain, they were …

            What, then?  Monsters?  Some sort of shape-shifter, a beast?

            Get him back.

            She didn’t need to be told.  She needed Barnabas; they all did.  “She’s coming back,” David had moaned in his sleep last night, burning hot to the touch in Carolyn’s arms, his head whipping back and forth on the pillow which was stained and damp in places.  “Oh stop her, stop her,” David cried, “she’s coming back, she’s coming back!  And she’ll bring the fire!”  Then he had fallen back against his pillows and slept deeply again.

            Laura Collins, Julia thought grimly, and paced about the room.  A phoenix, if what Barnabas and Quentin said was true.  An undead creature who returned time and again to propagate and then destroy her offspring.  The worst kind of mother:  the one who sacrificed her children to save herself.  Julia, who had never had children and expected that she never would, hated her for that fact alone.

Barnabas could help them … if he ever returned.  She felt a flare of anger.  He had abandoned them, that was what he had done, and in their time of need.  Elizabeth and Carolyn and David, they all needed him.  Even Quentin would, if he came back.  Sudden hatred boiled up inside her in a tide like black and stinging bile, acid, and she swallowed it back and clenched her fists until it went away.  She didn’t hate Barnabas.  How could she?  She loved him too much.

So she paced.  Maybe the room will change with me inside it, she thought, and sweep me off to that other time.  She chuckled, a dry, papery sign that echoed throughout the room.  She looked up, startled at the sound, and her eyes fell on the empty space above the mantle.  They narrowed then.  That was where the portrait of Angelique hung, she thought, in that world.  Who was she there, Julia wondered, who was she that she deserved a portrait hung high in what had to be the most glamorous room of them all?

Angelique, she thought, and her spine stiffened.  Not the Angelique of that world, Julia thought, but the one of my own.  She took the Mask of Ba’al … she brought that power into herself … she has the most power of anyone in this world, surely!  She could bring Barnabas back … couldn’t she?

Don’t do it.  She’ll destroy you.  She destroys everything she touches.

We were friends, Julia thought, or something close to that.  The human Angelique Julia had known as they battled the Leviathans could be kind, could be gentle even … but what was she now?

            I must find out, Julia thought, and her hands clenched into tight fists.  For the sake of the Collins family in this time, if not for Barnabas’.

            “Angelique,” she whispered, “Angelique, hear my voice … hear me calling for you …”

2

 

            “Are you feeling better, my dear?”  Barnabas forced his voice to be soft, but inside the beast that had ravaged the Collinsport of his own time still snarled, its voice loud and hideously clear.  Must have blood, the creature that lived inside Barnabas Collins hissed, must, must, must have blood.  He had garnered some control over the curse while fighting the Leviathan threat with Julia, but now …

            Julia!

            He felt remorse settle over him in a familiar mantle, and he closed his eyes and suppressed a moan.  Though this woman wasn’t the Julia Hoffman he knew (he refused to use the past tense), the resemblance between the two was devastating.  When feeding on his victims, Barnabas only had the dimmest sense of their thoughts and feelings, and what he learned from the woman kneeling in the midnight grass before him was all tinged with bitterness and despair.  She misses someone, he understood, she has lost someone very close to her, and she is still mourning.

            He could empathize.

            Julia Hoffman’s eyes stared forward, and her mouth trembled.  “I … don’t know,” she whispered.  One hand rose unsteadily to her throat and brushed at the twin wounds there.  She looked at her fingers, saw how they were stained with blood, and her eyes bulged and her mouth gaped open and she began to shriek.

            Barnabas looked around, but the woods were empty.  Still, he turned back to her and focused all his power and commanded, “Be quiet, Julia.”

            Her mouth snapped shut, and she stared at him with horror-stricken eyes.  Her mouth worked but no sound would come out. 

            Barnabas stroked her hair with a tenderness that had to remind himself he felt for his Julia, not this woman before him who was virtually a stranger.

            I don’t understand any of this.  Who are these people?  How is it they look so like we do?  And where am I, where do I exist in this … parallel time?

            “You will answer my questions,” Barnabas said, his voice low and mellifluous, and he continued to train his eyes on Julia’s.  Did she feel nothing for him?  Did his kiss trigger nothing inside her, no flood of emotion, no desire to serve?  Was he truly losing his powers, or did they not function the same way in this dimension?  “Do you understand?  Tell me you understand.”

            “I understand,” Julia sighed. 

            “Do you know what has happened to you?”

            She hesitated, then nodded.  She stared for a moment at her fingertips, and moaned again. 

            “How?” Barnabas asked, eyes narrowed.  “Tell me how you know.”

            “We … have had vampires at Collinwood … before,” she managed. 

            “You have!”  He wasn’t certain why he felt surprised.  Was the Collins family doomed to fall victim to the forces of Darkness, no matter what century or time band in which they existed?

            Julia nodded.  Her eyes were dull and beginning to glaze.  She couldn’t stop fingering the wounds at her throat. 

            “You must tell me about the family in this world,” Barnabas said.

            “This … world?”

            “Yes,” he said, “for I am not from this reality.  I come from another dimension, another time.”

            “That … is not possible.”

            “It is.  You are going to help me, Julia, and I will need all the help I can muster.  I hoped that by entering this world I would be able to be free of the curse.  But the curse is with me and will remain with me; I see that now.  Angelique’s powers have reached even into another world.”

            “Angelique!”  Hoffman’s face had taken on some vitality at last, and color suddenly bloomed in her cheeks.

            “What about her?”

            “Angelique did this to you?  How is that possible?  Angelique is dead!  She has been destroyed!”

            “What do you mean, ‘destroyed’?”

            But Hoffman was already weeping.  “She is gone,” the woman sobbed, “gone, gone gone …”

            “Angelique existed in this time as well,” Barnabas said, wonderingly.  “Tell me about her.”  Barnabas clamped down on Hoffman’s will, and her tears stopped as suddenly as they had started.  Her face grew blank and dreamy again.  Her voice, when she spoke, was mechanical and hesitant. 

            “She is – was – the daughter of Timothy Stokes.  He is a janitor at the University in Rockport.  She married Quentin Collins ten years ago.  She has been … dead for six months.”

            “How did she die?”

            “At a séance,” Hoffman said, but hesitated, then added more quickly, “Her twin sister Alexis lives at Collinwood now, but I’m not sure for how much longer.”

            “Who else lives at Collinwood?  Who is Quentin?”

            She was listing now, her voice a robot’s, an automaton.  “Quentin is the son of Poplar and Glenda Collins.  Poplar was the son of Nora Collins.   Poplar's sister Vanessa’s sons and daughter kept the Collins name, even though she married someone from the town.  They are Tom and Chris and Amy Collins.”

            “So,” Barnabas said quietly, “this is how history might have played in my own time if Quentin Collins had not become immortal, if Nora had not left for California.”  Hoffman stared at him incuriously.  She didn’t blink.  “What about them?  Where are they now?”

“Tom lives at the house.  He and his brother should have inherited Collinwood and the majority of the fortune, but Vanessa insisted that her sons leave Collinsport.  She believed there is a curse on the house and the money.  After she died, her will specified that her sons were to have nothing to do with Poplar’s son, who inherited the house from his uncle.”

“And Quentin?”

“He is remarrying now, so soon after Angelique’s death.”  Hoffman’s face darkened.  “Too soon.  He loved her and she loved him and this … marriage,” and she spat the word, “is … is some kind of blasphemy.”

            “Who is the bride?”

            “Maggie Evans,” Hoffman said, “a girl none of us know well.  She and her sister left Collinsport when they were children.  She and Quentin had a …a whirlwind romance,” and her eyes rolled madly, “when they met in Montevideo this spring.  He is bringing her home tonight.”  Her lips twisted into a smirk.  “Or he would have.  Their plane was delayed.  They are still in Boston.”

            “And …”  Barnabas licked his lips.  “And Victoria Winters?”

            Hoffman frowned.  “Do you mean Victoria Collins?”

            “Victoria … Collins,” Barnabas whispered.

            Hoffman’s face hardened.  “She doesn’t belong here, not really.  She’s related to Elizabeth’s side of the family, and they have all fallen out of favor.  Only Elizabeth and Roger remain at Collinwood.”

            “Louise,” Barnabas nodded.

            “Louise Collins, yes,” Hoffman said, frowning a bit.  “How do you know all this?”

            “Go on,” Barnabas said.  There was a distinct note of warning in his voice that caused Julia to flinch.

            “She’s a strange girl,” Hoffman said.  “Quiet.  She seems to love Quentin, even though they are cousins …” Hoffman giggled.  “… and even though he could never love her back.”

            “She loves Quentin,” Barnabas said.  Pain lanced his chest as if he had been staked there.  She loves Quentin even if we are in another time, Barnabas thought; will I never win?  Am I doomed by Angelique’s curse even now, beyond the part of me that is vampire?  Will no one ever love me?

            Hoffman was staring at him warily, as if he might attack her again.  He held out his hand to her instead.  She took it after a moment’s hesitation, and he helped her rise.  With his other hand he held his wolf’s head cane; it flashed under the light of the moon.  “Come, my dear,” he said.  “We have much to do before this night is over.  You must help me find more … suitable quarters.  Then, tomorrow night, we will prepare for my homecoming.”

3

            As morning became afternoon, and as Buffie’s disappearance continued on, unexplained, Elizabeth Stoddard stood in Angelique’s room and glared up at her picture.  Her brother Roger stood at her side, looking up with her, but his was the devotion of one who has seen the face of something exquisite, divine.  Elizabeth, who had felt no love for the dead woman, could only glare.  “I thought I would find her in here for certain,” Elizabeth said.  “Hoffman’s insistence that this room be kept ready is almost fanatical.  If she isn’t here, I thought that Buffie would be.”

            “She’s probably run off,” Roger said smugly, “and good riddance to her.”

            Elizabeth shifted her glare to her brother.  “You,” she said, “positively reek of gin.”

            “I prefer gin to anything else,” Roger said, grinning.  “It takes the edge off things, you see.  I expect I’ll need a little edge myself.  For the big moment.”

            Elizabeth’s hands dueled with each other before her pink sweater.  “I’m so nervous,” she said, then allowed one of her twitching hands to twine for a moment in the fall of her dark hair.  “Do you think she’ll like us?”

            “I don’t care one way or another,” Roger said airily.  “I plan to have as little to do with her as possible, and I suggest that you do the same.”

            “You don’t mean that.”

            “Oh Liz, of course I do.”  He allowed his eyes to drift back to Angelique’s portrait.  There she sat, as brought to life by Damion Edwards, a bohemian artist  and another of her favorites.  He had simply captured her, from the jewel that blazed with light around her neck to those that glittered in her blonde curls … and the dress!  That dress!  Roger had helped her pick it out himself.  He could still remember the day they found it at that shop in the Village in New York.  “You’ve out done yourself, old boy,” she had told him, and they had shared mirrored grins as she fingered the blue silk.  “I have a pair of gloves that you’ll just die to see,” she had said, “they’re madness, they’re so perfect.  Oh Roger, what an eye you have!”  She bought the dress and wore it with the elbow-high white gloves and Damion painted her in them that next week.  She is a goddess, Roger thought now, and lifted his glass to her.  “No one will ever replace Angelique.  No one should even try.”

            “Angelique is dead,” Elizabeth said, her face twisted into a moue of disgust. 

            “Perhaps she is,” Roger purred, “and perhaps she isn’t.”

            The doors to Angelique’s room flew open.  Carolyn stood before them.  Her eyes bulged, her face was ghostly white, and her mouth worked helplessly.  

            “Darling,” Elizabeth said and took a step towards her daughter, “what’s wrong?”

            “Has Quentin arrived with his little bride?” Roger sneered.  “That’s the face I plan to wear when he does.”

            “It’s Buffie,” Carolyn choked.  Tears ran down her face.  “She’s in the West Wing.  Her body, I mean.”

            “Her body!” Elizabeth cried.

            “Yes,” Carolyn said hysterically, “her body!  She’s dead, Mother!  She’s been … she’s been stabbed!”  And she allowed herself to be enfolded in her mother’s arms, where she sobbed and sobbed.  She didn’t therefore see the twin looks her mother and uncle exchanged.  “She’s dead, she’s dead, Buffie is dead!”

4

             “I’m afraid,” Maggie Evans Collins said in the little-girl voice she had been working on so hard to discard when Quentin Collins had swooped into her life and taken her away from the boredom that was beginning to set in as she had attended to her father’s elderly sister Maria, a wealthy woman who took Maggie in after her father’s death as a sort of social secretary and traveling companion, two terms Maggie hadn’t completely understood when she had accepted the old woman’s invitation to accompany her to Montevideo.  “You’ll die alone,” Maria Evans had hissed the day Maggie told her about Quentin’s proposal.  “The Collins house has always held unhappy women, and Quentin is a Collins just like the rest of them.”  Her rheumy old eyes had sparkled.  “Maybe worse.”  Maggie had bitten back her tears ferociously and left her aunt’s hotel room without another word.  She thought it possible that she would never see Maria again.

            And she was okay with this.  Mostly.

            “Don’t be.”  Quentin didn’t sound angry with her; he never really sounded angry, or even annoyed.  Even, she thought ruefully, when he should.  “They’ll love you.  They all will.”

            “But I don’t know them,” Maggie said plaintively.  “Not even Carolyn, and isn’t she the same age as I am?”

            “She is.”  Quentin took her hand with his free one; with the other he steered the wheel of the car he purchased on a whim in Bangor after the plane’s arrival had been delayed.  Maggie, who had never had money before, had yet to adjust to the casual way in which Quentin handled all his affairs.  His philosophy seemed simple:  if a problem cropped up, throw money at it until it went away. 

            Maggie smiled.  “How do you want to bet that I’ll be like one of those women who sits around arranging flowers all day?”

            “And loving me,” Quentin chuckled.  “Like something out of House and Garden.”

            Maggie settled back against the car seat.  The thin layer of clouds over their head made the early afternoon daylight thin and white.  Her head began to ache.  She closed her eyes.  Collinwood, she thought.  I’m going to live at Collinwood.

            I am a Collins.

            That thought made her smile.  She wasn’t really afraid, she decided.  Not with Quentin at her side.  He had told her once that they could do anything together.  She believed him. 

            There was the house, she thought as she opened her eyes, there, just over the hill.  The hills and lawns were flooded with the green of early summer and glistened with the rain that was now beginning to fall from the leaden sky over their heads.  “Damn,” Quentin said cheerfully, “I’d better put the top up.”

            “No,” Maggie said suddenly.  He looked at her, a silent question in his enormous blue eyes.  “It isn’t so bad.  Not really.  And I like to feel the air on my face.  I feel … free.”

            “You are the queen of my castle,” Quentin said, and kissed her quickly.  “Whatever you want, you shall have.”

            Whatever I want, Maggie thought, and leaned back to watch the emerald scenery rush by her as they approached the great house that now, she began to truly understand, belonged to her.

5

             Hoffman, Quentin thought, simply wasn’t herself.  Not at all.

            The woman he had tolerated but never really liked stood ramrod straight, as was her habitual posture, in Collinwood’s front doorway.  Her face was paper-white, her hair pulled back severely as usual, but weren’t there a few errant strands loose, curling like crimson serpents around her arched eyebrows?  He thought there were.  That in itself was strange.  Hoffman was not given to letting any of her flaws show.  Blue veins lay like snakes just beneath the surface of her skin.  “Mr. Collins,” she said, and smiled, and Quentin saw how pale her gums were in the white afternoon light, and how they seemed to have drawn back from her teeth, which now seemed sharper somehow, “Mrs. Collins.  Welcome to Collinwood.”

            “Thank you, Miss Hoffman,” Maggie said with a graciousness that Quentin was proud of. 

            “You’re not looking like your old self, Hoffman,” Quentin boomed.  “Hitting the bottle a bit too hard, perhaps?”

            “Quentin!” Maggie said, and put a hand to her mouth.  But he thought she might be smiling a bit.

            “I feel fine, sir,” Hoffman said.  Her voice was stone.  She wasn’t smiling, that much was certain. 

            “I’m sure you do,” Quentin said.  “Will you call Trask to fetch our luggage?”

            “I’ve already done so, sir,” Hoffman said.  “I saw your car from the hill.”

            “Hoffman is exceptional at taking care of everyone in this house,” Quentin told Maggie.  The young woman’s wide eyes were fixed on Hoffman, but if she still felt the fear she had claimed in the car ride, she wasn’t exhibiting it.  Good, good.  “You won’t have to do anything at all.”

            “How nice.”  Maggie’s voice was warm.

            They followed Hoffman into the house, and Quentin closed the door behind them, then jammed both his hands into his pockets and looked around.  He frowned.  He thought it would feel good to be home, but it didn’t.  Not at all.  Perhaps he had expected the ghost of Angelique to appear upon his first step into the foyer; perhaps he felt disappointed because she hadn’t.

            “Father,” Daniel Collins said from the top of the staircase, and Quentin looked up to meet his son’s gaze.  Daniel was twelve, or would be soon.  Though the boy didn’t know it, he was actually Quentin’s adopted son, born of the ill-fated “romance” of Roger Collins and the now-departed Laura Stockbridge, dead ten years from smoke inhalation in a fire that had started mysteriously in a room in the West Wing.  Laura had claimed to be the daughter of a doctor in Boston, though Quentin had never been able to validate these claims.  Didn’t matter.  After Laura’s admittedly mysterious death, Roger departed Collinsport for nearly a decade, roaring to anyone who would listen that he didn’t need any brat of a son and that he certainly couldn’t be expected to care for a mewling, shitting child.  Quentin had quietly adopted the boy, named him Daniel, and that had been the end of that.  Even Roger’s return to the great house had yet to disrupt the flow of the life Quentin had established for the boy.

            “Daniel,” Quentin said, and began to grin.  Daniel took the stairs two at a time, then leapt into his father’s arms.  Quentin squeezed him as tightly as he could.  It had been too long.  Perhaps he should have brought Daniel on the trip with him.  Didn’t matter now, he supposed.  The boy didn’t seem out of sorts, angry, sullen, evinced no darker emotion that belied any resentment he held towards Quentin.  “Miss me?” he asked.

            Daniel nodded fervently.  “I did, I did,” he said, and returned his father’s grin.  “Are you married, Father?  Really?”

            “Really really,” Quentin said.  He slid an arm around Maggie’s waist and drew her closer to him.  “Daniel, this is Maggie.  My wife.”

            “I’m pleased to meet you, Daniel,” Maggie said.  Now, perhaps, there was a tremor that her voice hadn’t held when she was introduced to Hoffman.  Well, so what?  She would loosen up.  Soon Collinwood would feel like home.

            Daniel looked at her without expression at first.  Then, gradually, he began to smile, and extended a hand to her.  “Nice to meet you,” he said, as quietly as she.  He seemed somber, almost mournful.  A shadow passed over Quentin’s face.  Perhaps this wouldn’t be as easy as he had first assumed.

            But Maggie began to smile a bit too.  Quentin relaxed.  “Come on,” he said, and ruffled his son’s shaggy brown hair.  “Let’s show Maggie around Collinwood, what do you say?”

            As they left the room, Victoria stepped from the shadows where she had concealed herself with a simple dimming spell.  Her mouth was set, her hands clenched into fists.   Hoffman watched her expressionlessly. Vicki’s eyes met hers and narrowed.

            Neither woman said a word.

6

 

“It’s late,” Chris said, and glanced at the cheap wristwatch Sebastian had given him for Christmas last year.  Chris had smiled and pretended to believe that it was a Rolex, but he was a Collins, and the Collins family had expensive tastes.  How well he knew that.  Had always known that.

“It’s only seven o’clock,” Tom said.  He didn’t look at all well, Chris thought, but didn’t say so out loud.  For a moment he flashed back to a time – long ago, decades now – when he and Tom and Joey Haskell had palled around the summer they were all twelve, the summer they played magician and monsters and swam for hours in the surf at the base of Widow’s Hill.  Joey told them all about the ghosts of the sailors’ wives who had flung themselves to their doom; he kissed me under a waterfall, Chris remembered suddenly, and looked away from his brother’s face; he kissed me and Tom saw it and never said a word, but he knew.  And he knew that I knew.

            But Joey – Joe, now – was gone; married some local girl and took her to Boston and then off into the rest of the world.  They hadn’t been friends for a long time, and it didn’t matter anyway.  None of that stupid past mattered.

            It does though, don’t you think?  Look at the way he stares at you.  He doesn’t blink.  And he’s too pale.  Sick, maybe.

            None of my business, Chris thought, and there was no guilt or weight with the thought.  He didn’t hate his brother; he didn’t … anything his brother.  That was all.

            “Why did you want to see me?” Chris asked.

            “Brother, brother,” Tom simpered.  “You haven’t seen me at all since your return to town.  I simply wanted to … give you my felicitations.”

            Chris frowned.  “Is that all?”

            Tom’s eyes opened as with shock.  But there was something dancing in them, Chris thought, way back there in the shadows, something like mirth.  Dark mirth.  “Christopher, how can you talk to me this way?  I’m your brother!”

            “I suppose,” Chris said through gritted teeth.  “Tom, I have things to do.”

            “Your boyfriend, for one,” Tom purred.

            Chris glared at him.  “I have things to do,” he said again.  He forced his voice to remain calm and controlled.  Years of practice, Chris thought.  “Tell me what you want so I can get back to it.”  Behind them, at the edge of the wharf, the ocean waves crashed loudly.  Thunder rumbled uneasily out over the water.  There would be another storm tonight, Chris thought.  Wouldn’t be Collinsport without one.

            “I want you to move back into Collinwood,” Tom said suddenly, and Chris could only gape at him. 

            Then he laughed.

            “That,” he said, “will never happen.”

            “Why?  Because of what happened to Buffie?”

            “That’s only a part of it.  No.  Never gonna happen.”

 

            Tom returned his glare.  His eyes blazed above those shadowed, sunken hollows.  “You can bring Sebastian, of course,” he said.  “But I want you back in that house.”

            “Why?” Chris asked.  The laughter threatened to boil out of his mouth again.   This was too, too absurd.

            “I don’t like it there … alone,” Tom whispered, and looked away.  Chris felt the laughter drying up.

            “You mean that.  Don’t you.  You’re scared.”

            “I’m not scared,” Tom growled.  He is absolutely miserable, Chris thought in wonderment, and here I thought Tom didn’t have feelings at all.  “But Amy is,” he added.  “And I can’t … attend to her as much as I would like to.”

            “You think I can.”

            “You love her.”

            “Don’t you?”

            “Of course I do,” Tom snapped, but quickly, too quickly.  Chris felt any empathy he held towards his brother dissolve.  “You have to come back,” Tom said.  “If there is a curse on Collinwood, then we can fight it together … you, me, and Amy.  But I can’t do it alone, Christopher.  I can’t.”

            Chris looked at his brother for a long time. 

            Then he turned away.  The air around the wharfs stank.  There was a girl leaning against the damp, rotted wood of one of the office buildings that had once-upon-a-time belonged to the Collins family.  Now it was empty, devoid of life, decomposing here at the edge of the sea.  The girl was smoking.  She stared at the twins and exhaled a stream of smoke.  She smiled.  Her lipstick had stained her teeth a garish mauve.  Chris felt depression like a blanket settle over him.  “Good night, Tom,” he said, and began to walk away.

            Tom watched him go.  He didn’t move; didn’t blink; his chest did not rise; no air passed from his lips.

            He began to smile.

            “Good night, brother,” he whispered.  The smile flickered and was gone.

            “Hey,” the girl called from behind him, “got a light?”

7

            Julia Hoffman lay face down the ground.  She had ceased to writhe and whimper only a few seconds ago.  Barnabas stood upright, facing the icy, howling gale, and though he didn’t feel the cold or the pain, his eyes dried and he bared his fangs.  “Appear, spirit!” he roared, and raised his cane against the wind.  It stank of carrion.

            The shadows of the tomb at Eagle Hill were thick, and they were thicker beyond the door of the secret room, which apparently existed in this time as well as his own.  Hoffman had certainly been surprised; even more so when they pulled open the door and the wind began to shriek.  He had spent the day under the floorboards in one of the abandoned offices that lay against the ocean in downtown Collinsport, without even a coffin in which to rest (the soil he nestled against throughout the day, comfortingly, was apparently similar enough to that which came from his own world; when he awoke, he was un-withered and un-destroyed, though thirsty, and for the first time he wondered if the legend about a vampire coating the bed of its coffin with earth from its home was really true), and when he rose at dusk, Hoffman had been waiting for him.  “I know a place,” she told him.  “Come with me.”

            I should have thought of this myself, Barnabas had told himself … until Hoffman tugged on the ring inside the stone lion’s mouth, and the door swung open, and released hell upon them.  The inhuman screaming of whatever spirit guarded this place had driven Hoffman into unconsciousness in seconds.

            But I must stand, Barnabas thought wearily; I must always stand.  “Appear to me,” he called again, “if you dare!”

            The screaming faded away to a moan, and the air around him sparkled as if snow crystals danced there.  Two faded gray eyes appeared and hung before him, unblinking, burning with fury.

            I know those eyes.

            “Father,” Barnabas whispered.

             “You are no son of mine,” the voice of Joshua Collins boomed.  “You are a creature … an animal!”

            “Perhaps I am,” Barnabas said softly. “But I mean you no harm.”

            “I am beyond harm,” the spirit said.  “But you … you do mean harm.  You mean death to anyone whose path crosses yours.  You would destroy the legacy I have built.”

            “I would not.”

            “You would!”  A face began to materialize, lined and silvered as Barnabas remembered from his own youth.  My father’s face, he thought with a pang.  “You are a monster!  My son was human … loved his family!”

            “So do I!”

            “Then why do you harm them?  Look at what you have done to this woman.  Would you perpetrate even more misery?  Return to the world from whence you came or destroy yourself.”

            “I cannot.”

            “Face the sun.  It will rise again, as it always rises.  Face it and allow it to consume you.  Destroy yourself, before it is too late!”

            “No, Father!”  Barnabas felt the slinging slap of the spectral hand across his face the moment the words left his lips.  The tang of salt flooded his mouth.  The ghost had opened a wound on his face.  Barnabas felt the vampire inside him twist and snarl at the taste of his own blood, and he raised his cane high.  “I banish you, Joshua Collins,” Barnabas intoned, “in the name of the Judge of the Quick and the Dead …”

            “You have no power over me,” Joshua snarled.

            “But I do,” a woman’s voice said, and both men, ghost and vampire, turned in shock.

            “Angelique?” Hoffman moaned from the floor of the tomb.

            It was.  Another ghost shimmered into view, and one Barnabas recognized instantly.  She appeared as she had in his time, back when it all started:  her golden hair twisted into ringlets, a mop-cap perched pertly atop her curls, her hands folded placidly before the white apron that adorned the olive-green servant’s dress she wore.  The ghost of Angelique Bouchard smiled wickedly, and took a step closer to the men in her path.  Barnabas’ eyes widened.  She wasn’t human; he could see the wall of the tomb behind her, sweating stone.  “You would undo all my plans, Joshua Collins,” the ghost of Angelique purred, “as you did in life.  You tried to prevent my marriage to your brother Jeremiah.  I stopped you then, and I will stop you again.”

 

            “You are a witch,” Joshua thundered.

            “I was,” the ghost of Angelique said.  “And I could have been happy if you had not interfered.  Because of you, my beloved Jeremiah died at Widow’s Hill, and because of you, I laid a curse on the Collins family for all time.  No one who dwells at Collinwood will be happy, I promised you that.  No one!”

            “Angelique,” Hoffman sobbed.

            The ghost cast its eyes on the housekeeper.  They were stony, unmoved.  “I am not your precious Angelique,” it said.  “She is flesh of my flesh, true, the daughter of my daughters, brilliant and talented, but lost, lost, lost.  She will never be as she was, and I am not she, so cry no tears for me, or I will take you with me when I leave this world again.”

            “No!” Hoffman cried.

            But the ghost’s eyes had flicked away from her.  “Come with me, Joshua Collins,” she said.  “Return with me to the land of the dead, for I intend that this vampire will wreak the destruction that I desire, that I can no longer cause myself.  Let him go forth and destroy all those at Collinwood, as they deserve to be destroyed!”  She held out one hand and began to move toward Joshua’s spirit.

            His face grayed and blanched, and he managed to cry, “No!” once before she caught him, wrapped her long arms around him, pulled him closer, and Barnabas recoiled as he saw that her face had become a grinning skull with blonde curls and glaring blue eyes.

            Then they were gone, and he and Hoffman were alone.

           

            She was gasping and moaning, and Barnabas knelt beside her.  “Are you all right, Miss Hoffman?” he whispered.

            She jerked away at his touch.  “As if you care,” she snarled, and watched as he flinched at her words, as his face grayed with the misery he felt.  “You are a beast,” she hissed, “a foul thing.  She’s right.  You will destroy everyone at Collinwood.”

            “No,” he moaned.  “You are wrong.”

            “I am not.  Angelique was right.  My Angelique.  She knew there was a curse on this house.  You are part of that curse.  You have been brought into this world to fulfill its promise.”

            “No.”

            “You will drain them even as you drain me.  Is that what you did in your own world?”  She cackled her cruelty.  “Oh, how rich!  Of course you did!”

            “Be quiet,” Barnabas growled.

            She ignored him.  Tears squirted from her eyes, but she only laughed harder.  She rolled back and forth on the floor of the tomb; her black dress was stained white with the dust of ages.  “Rich, rich, rich,” she howled.  “Was there a woman like me?  Was there a Julia Hoffman in your world?  Did you feed on her too?”

            “Stop it!”

            “You should let me stake you now!” she screamed and swung her claws at his face.

            He seized her by the shoulders, stared into her almond-wide, tortured eyes, and bared his fangs.  “I will hear no more of this!” he roared, and sank them into her throat.

 

8

            “Angelique,” Julia moaned, “Angelique.”  She had returned to the room at dusk, hoping against hope that Barnabas would be there, or that she would at least see him as he was in that other world, so she would know if he was safe.  But the room had been empty, silent, shadowed.  A part of her had known it would be.  “You mustn’t go there, Julia,” Elizabeth had told her.  “What if takes you too?”

            “I want it to,” had been her stony reply.  “Don’t you understand?  I would go anywhere to be with him, risk anything.”

            “He may not be able to be saved,” Elizabeth had said, and Julia had left the room.

            How well I know that, she thought now, her eyes trained again on that empty place where the portrait of Angelique hung in that other world.  But he needs me, she thought, he always needs me, and so, fighting desperately to feel hope at all, she called again, “Angelique!”

           

            Julia’s eyes widened. 

            There was a portrait hanging there where there had been no portrait only a moment ago.

            Angelique.

            A blonde woman in a bonnet, a Puritan woman with white-blonde curls escaping her cap; then the portrait shifted and blurred and became Angelique as Julia had known her when she possessed the body of Natalie DuPres; then it shifted and blurred again and became Angelique in a blue and mauve high-necked collar; blurred again and showed Julia the visage of Cassandra Collins, her hair a dark, stiff helmet, fangs lying over her lips, and Julia moaned in terror; then it shifted a final time and became a portrait of Angelique from the other night, the last time Julia had seen her:  her hair an ebony tide spilling over her bare, marble-white shoulder, her eyes black and shining, her face a-crawl with mystical symbols.

            Then that laughter … that familiar, maddening laughter …

            Julia clapped her hands to her ears and cried, “Stop it!  Stop it!  Stop it!” 

            But it wouldn’t stop.

            And then the shadows thickened, and the laughter did stop, and Angelique stepped forth from them, hips swaying beneath the shiny black leather pants she wore now, her hair black, her face white, her eyes twin drops of oil.  Her black lips writhed against the whiteness of her teeth.  “You have called on me, Julia Hoffman,” Angelique said, “and it is the last thing you will ever do.”

TO BE CONTINUED ...