Shadows on the Wall Chapter 89

CHAPTER 89:  Long Day

by Nicky

Voiceover by David Selby:  “There has been death at the Collinwood of Parallel Time and more may follow.  And while Barnabas Collins sleeps in his lonely tomb so far from his home, there is more intrigue developing that may spell destruction for someone else in the great house at the end of this, one of the longest days the family of this world has ever known …”

1

            The long night was over.

            Quentin Collins loved Collinwood, felt at home there, didn’t believe in curses.  He knew that Chris Collins, his cousin who was one of the most amazing lawyers on the east coast but refused to set foot in the great house, believed in the so-called “family curse,” but if there was such a thing – and Quentin always said he would deny it to the death – he had never seen any evidence of it.

           

            Until tonight.

            “Maggie is dead.”  He whispered the words as he crossed the threshold of the house and looked around.  He had yet to close the immense front doors, and early morning summer sunlight splashed over his feet and dappled the stone floor of the great hall.  He stared at it stupidly for a moment, then blinked wearily, closed the doors behind him, and leaned against the wall.  He ran a hand through his shaggy hair.  Maggie was dead, and Daniel was in intensive care.  Attacked in his mother’s room by – of all people – Damion Edwards.

            There are no such thing as curses.

            But Maggie was still dead.  And Daniel had looked so pale, so fragile, there in his hospital bed, the back of his head bandaged, and the doctor’s grim assessment – “He might never regain consciousness, Mr. Collins, honestly, and if he does … well …”  Grim coughing, grim shuffling of his scuffed black loafers, grim scratching on the clipboard he carried.  “… there’s no telling if he’ll be the boy you remember.”

            The boy you remember.

            My son.  My heir. 

            He can’t die.

 

            Of course he could.  Angelique had, hadn’t she?  And he had loved her more than anything in this world or any other.

            You loved her at first, you mean.

            Stupid, cynical voice.  Quentin tried to block it out, clasped his hands to his ears.  He wouldn’t hear it, not now.  He had loved Angelique, even if their marriage had begun to falter toward the end.  Maggie hadn’t believed him, he knew – she thought that he loved her still – but she was beginning to fade.  He never went into her room, wanted it closed forever, but Alexis insisted, and so did Hoffman, and what did it hurt?  There were no ghosts, no curses, no monsters. 

            But Maggie is dead.

            How was that possible?

            He knew how.  Someone had cut out her heart.  Just as someone had slashed Buffie Harrington to ribbons.

            And Angelique …?

            “Angelique died of a stroke,” Quentin whispered.  The doctor had confirmed it.  Damion Edwards swore that he would prove otherwise, but then he had disappeared …

            Until tonight.  Until he attacked my son.

            And Daniel was his son, no matter what Roger thought or what Angelique had said in her darker moments.  And Daniel himself, he must never know.

            “Oh Quentin.”  His head jerked up.  It was Victoria, dark, beautiful Victoria, Angelique’s nemesis and a woman he would never consider in a million years, never mind that she too was adopted and not really a Collins.  There was something in her eyes … something that had always made him shiver.

 

            But then again, Angelique’s eyes weren’t known for their gentle, human luster either.

            “I’m so, so sorry,” Victoria said, and began her descent.

            “Thank you,” he said.  He was exhausted, and the words buzzed like dying hornets against his lips and on the backsides of his teeth. 

            “If there’s anything I can do …”

            “Sleep,” Quentin muttered.  “I need …”

            She was looking at him, and he didn’t like that.  Something … something about her eyes.  He couldn’t look away.  He tried.  He wanted to blink, but they felt frozen, his eyelids, held open as if invisible fingers forced them back. 

            And her eyes …

            “Let me help you,” Victoria said.  “Let me get you to bed.” 

            “Bed,” he murmured.  He couldn’t look away.  Her pupils were growing and shrinking, and that wasn’t possible, but that’s what they were doing.  Growing … and shrinking.  Growing … and shrinking, until the black threatened to swallow the doe-like brown.

            “Yes,” Victoria said, and her hand caressed his cheek.  “Bed.”

            She was so close to him, and he could smell her – and he recoiled.  She smelled bad, a dark, sick smell that invaded his nostrils and churned his stomach.  Vomit filled his mouth, sickly-sweet and bitter, burning.

            But he couldn’t draw away from her.

            And her arms had snaked around him.

            “Quentin,” she whispered in his ear.

            His mouth brushed hers.

            “Oh my god,” he whispered.  His eyes had finally broken away from hers, and he pushed her back.  His forehead was wet with ice droplets.

            Impossible … I couldn’t have seen what I thought I saw …

            “Quentin?”  Victoria’s voice was sharp and buzzing, inhuman with fury.  “Quentin, what is the matter with you?”

            “Angelique,” he whispered, his eyes fixed to a place at the top of the stairs.  “I saw Angelique!”

2

            “You shouldn’t have gone out there!” hissed Julia Hoffman.

            Angelique closed the double doors to the room where the time warp had flared at her command and swept them off to … Collinwood?  Her face was pinched and terrified, but flushed at the same time, filled with high color in her cheeks.  Her blue eyes snapped with vitality.

           

            The hair that flowed down her back in a tide was icily, whitely blonde.

            After the world had tilted and twisted and Julia had felt as if she were in the grip of two enormous, crushing hands and then straightened again, and the howling of alien winds had ceased to wail in her ears, she had opened her eyes and found that she was standing in Angelique’s room as it existed in that other world, the world of what Eliot Stokes called “parallel time.”  The carpet was cream-colored and soft beneath her feet, and the curtains that lined the windows were a brilliant orange, like mangoes or tangerines. 

            And there was the portrait.  The chilling, smirking visage of Angelique Collins.

            And when Julia had turned to face her Angelique Collins – or, to be exact, Angelique Bouchard Collins Collins Rumson, at least in this incarnation – she had received a nasty shock.

 

            Color had filled the other woman’s cheeks, replacing the deathly pallor that Julia had observed in her face ever since she removed the Mask of Ba’al after she had pressed it to her face in that terrible moment at Stokes’ cottage.  Her eyes were wide and crystalline blue, and all the black had drained from her hair.  “Angelique!” Julia cried. 

            “We’re here, Julia,” Angelique panted.  The strange edge to her voice – an ethereal, echoic quality that it had held ever since she had consumed the dark power of the mask – was gone, and she sounded like the Angelique Julia had grown to like over the past few months.  “We made it … wherever ‘here’ is.”

            “It’s Collinwood,” Julia said.  Her breathing was ragged and came in stitches, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the other woman.  “But … but Angelique …”

            “We must find Barnabas and return to this room immediately,” the other woman said, “and then we will return to our own time.”

            “Angelique … your hair … your face …”

            Angelique frowned.  “Julia, this is no time for dramatics.  I …”  Her eyes went wide, and her fingers traced tiny circles around her eyes and cheeks.  

            “What happened?”  Julia approached her and reached for her face.  In her detached, clinical doctor’s voice, she said, “Something to do with the transcendence, I wonder, or did casting that spell drain all your powers …?”

            But Angelique recoiled and hissed, “Don’t touch me.”

            Julia pretended that the rebuff didn’t sting.  “But we have to know if there’s anything wrong … if something happened to you when we left our own world –”

            “You wait here,” Angelique commanded, and tossed her hair.  “I’m going to take a quick look around.”

            “Absolutely not,” Julia cried.  Her eyes narrowed and her lower lip trembled.  “You are not leaving me in this place by myself, I refuse –”

            But Angelique was already gone, out the double doors and into the hallway beyond.

            Julia glared after her, shook her head, then began to look around the room.  She was just beginning to fumble around the top of the dresser drawers in the corner of the room when the doors flew back open and then slammed shut.  Angelique had returned, her hair in her eyes, her color high.  “Quentin,” Angelique gasped, “Quentin saw me –”

            “Oh my god,” Julia moaned, and rolled her eyes.  “I warned you –”

            “It was only for a moment,” she hissed. 

 

            “But he recognized you.  My god, Angelique, look around this room – it’s practically a shrine to your doppelganger!” 

            “I’ll teleport us outside the house,” Angelique said reasonably, and Julia made a scoffing sound.  Angelique narrowed her eyes.  “Or perhaps I’ll simply teleport myself and leave you to fend for yourself.”

            Julia grumbled.  “Fine,” she said.

            Angelique closed her eyes and began to mutter under breath.  She wreathed her hands through the air, clutching and pulling at invisible forces Julia had never fully understood.  What were they?  Where did they come from?  And why could Angelique – as opposed to, say, Julia herself – manipulate them?

           

            Julia watched expectantly, keeping one eye on the doors to the bedroom.  She knew that they could burst open in any moment, and what could she possibly say?  Was there even a Julia Hoffman in this world that she could pretend to be?  And how would she ever explain Angelique?  If only she’d kept the dark hair, Julia thought grumpily, I could say she was a twin or something.  Seems to work well enough on all those silly TV shows lately.

            Angelique’s hands paused mid-air.  Her eyes flew open.  “What’s the matter?” Julia said.  “Why did you stop?”

            “I don’t understand,” Angelique said as if Julia hadn’t spoken.  “I don’t know what’s wrong!”

            “What’s wrong!”

 

            “My powers,” Angelique said, her voice choked, her eyes wide and blue and fixed on Julia’s.  “They’re … they’re gone!”

3

            “I don’t want to see you,” Timothy Stokes told his stepdaughter, and she turned away from him and her face grew ferocious, then thinned with her anger.  He turned away from her on his barstool at The Eagle tavern and threw back the rest of the Jamison in his tumbler, grimaced, then turned and exhaled the fumes into her face.  She didn’t recoil, wouldn’t allow herself to.  “I told you that before, when your sister died.  All the light went out of my world that night; you are a shadow, a pale imitation; you are nothing, girl, now leave me alone.”  Beside him, Will Loomis, the once-famous author, chuckled, and stirred his martini with a swizzle stick.

 

            “How can you say such things?” Alexis said.  Her voice was low and controlled; her hair, pulled back behind her head and twisted into a messy bun as had been her style for years, sought to escape its prison, and several strands like the serpents that crowned the gorgon head of Medusa coiled untidily in a frame about her face.  She pushed it away absently; a moment later and it had returned.  “You never saw me as your daughter; not like you saw her.”

            “You are quite correct in your assessment, my dear,” Stokes said.  “I often wonder what the world would have been like had Angelique never been born, had I been cursed with only you as a daughter, a millstone around my neck.”  He chuckled.  “Don’t my words wound you, Alexis?  Don’t they cut into your heart?”

            “You know that they do.”

            “Then go cry to someone else.  Go cry to Quentin.  I am sick of the sight of you.”

            “Quentin has been at the hospital all night,” Alexis said.  She had explained all this when she had entered the bar fifteen minutes ago.  It is just before noon, she thought furiously, and how many drinks has he consumed?  “Daniel was … was hurt last night.  Very badly.  They aren’t certain that he’ll make it.”

            Stokes sighed but said nothing.

            “There is a murderer at Collinwood, Father,” Alexis said.  “I should think that, despite your feelings for me, you would still be concerned enough to help me when I need you.”

            “I’m listening,” Stokes said at last.  Will tittered beside him.

            “Angelique,” Alexis said.  “She left many things behind.  Many obscure, shadowy things.”

            “That sounds about right.”

 

            “I have some questions.  I have something to show you, something you must see.  I … I can’t describe it to you, Father.  I can only say that it is mysterious and unfathomable.  I don’t understand it.  And I need your help if I ever will.”  She bowed her head; tears glistened in her crystalline eyes.

            Stokes drummed his fingers against the scarred surface of the bar.  “All right,” he said at last, and heaved himself off his bar stool.  Will gaped.  He scowled in his friend’s face, then turned to his stepdaughter.  “I will help you.  But I want you to make a bargain with me.”

            “What is it?” 

            “You sound defeated already, my girl.  You mustn’t.  I think it is a bargain you will be most pleased with, I promise you.”

            “Tell me, then we can leave this place and I will drive you to Collinwood.”

            “I prefer to drive myself, thank you.”

            “You are in no condition to –”

            “Then we shall make no bargain,” Stokes said, and spun quickly back to his bar stool.

           

            “No!” Alexis cried.  “No, wait.  I will hear you out.”

            “Yes?”  His eyes glinted sharply, vulpine in the folds of fat that rolled along his face.  The mustache above his lip was damp and black.  “All right.  Here are my terms.  I will come to Collinwood with you.  On my own steam.  I will see what you want me to see.  Then I will leave that house and never see you again.  Do you understand me, Alexis?  I never want to see you again.”

            She stared at him, and her eyes widened.  Her hands knotted into helpless fists of rage.

            At last she relaxed.  She dropped her eyes.  “All right, Father,” she said, and she sounded only tired, as if all the fury had leaked out of her.  “I think that can be arranged.”

4

             “Angelique,” Victoria said for the hundredth time, “is dead.  People don’t return from the grave, Quentin.”  She sat on the bed beside him and stroked his hair tenderly.  It was damp with sweat and had begun to curl into wings.

            “Yes they do,” he replied, and his eyes rolled madly in their sockets.  “Oh, yes, yes, yes, they do, they do.  Damion Edwards did, didn’t he?  Isn’t that what happened to my son?  Wasn’t he nearly killed by a vampire … something that returned from the grave?”

            “Angelique is not a vampire,” Victoria said.  She forced her voice to remain level, forced the irritation that wanted to tremble and warp it away.  I can’t put up with this all day, she thought, and brushed her long dark hair over her shoulder.  “Vampires must sleep during the day in coffins lined with soil from their graves.”

            Quentin sat up on one elbow and glared at her.  “How do you know so much about vampires all of a sudden?”

            “I forced myself to learn,” she snapped back, “after the séance, and all the talk of curses and monsters, and Angelique’s death.  Timothy Stokes, as repulsive as he is, told me he was once greatly invested in the occult.  I suppose that’s where Angelique picked up her interest as well.  I asked him about vampires, if you want to know.”

 

            “I despise this house sometimes,” Quentin said darkly.  “It killed both my wives.  My Maggie …”  He slammed one fist against the bedspread. 

            “You aren’t alone, Quentin,” Victoria said.  She ran one fingertip lightly against his cheek.

            He flinched away from her.  “Don’t touch me,” he said.

            “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and moved away from him.  She stood up and moved toward the door.  “I’ll leave you alone.”

            “You do that,” he said, and stared at the wall.  The sunlight streaming through it made interesting patterns.  He thought that, if he stared at them long enough, he wouldn’t see anything else. 

            “I only want to help you, Quentin,” Victoria said.  “I wish you would see that.  Someday I hope you will.”  And she was gone.

            Quentin didn’t move for a long time. 

             At last he stirred.  “Angelique is dead,” he said experimentally.  “Angelique … is dead.”

            He sat up, then threw his long legs off the bed and onto the floor.  He stood shakily, but he stood.  He was strong.  He was the master of Collinwood.

            It was time to find Hoffman.  She had been Angelique’s most loyal servant.  He would find her and question her, force her to tell him what she knew about Angelique that he did not … including whatever powers she was thought to have possessed.

            Quentin grinned.  It was cold, hard, utterly unpleasant.  He was going to enjoy this.  Yes, he thought as he left the room he would never share with Maggie, he thought that perhaps this dreadful day wouldn’t be a total loss after all.

5

 

            Collinwood was far behind them, but it wasn’t far enough for Julia Hoffman, who trailed behind Angelique as they both trudged through the woods towards the Old House.  That was the most likely place to find Barnabas, they had both figured.  Julia was panting, and ducked just in time to avoid a tree branch from walloping her in the face.  I have had just about enough of this, she thought, especially since Angelique isn’t capable of destroying me with a glance anymore.

            Which was a disturbing thought she didn’t have time to ponder right now.  And Angelique certainly didn’t want to discuss the loss of her powers which, Julia had tried to remind her, were the only reason they had been able to break through the warp and come to this time.  Without her powers, and even if they did find Barnabas, how on earth were they going to return to their own world?

            “Can’t you keep up?” Angelique snarled, barely turning her head to glare behind her.  “I swear, Julia Hoffman, if you have a heart attack, I will leave you in this forest and not even bother burying you, and I guarantee that not even your pathetic ghost will be able to cross that damned time barrier!”

           

            “A pity,” Julia snarled back, “that you embraced the powers of darkness instead of moonlighting as a motivational speaker.”

            “Where is it?” Angelique cried, and stopped so suddenly that Julia nearly ran into her.  The witch – or former witch, or former-former witch – stood in an open field where the woods had ejected them with her hands on her hips.  “Collinwood is in exactly the same place where it is in our world.  So where is the Old House?”

            Julia opened her mouth, ready to sling the perfectly scathing retort, but then she closed it with a snap.  Angelique was right.  In their own world, the open space where they now stood, gaping together, held the Old House, soaring up to the sky, all white columns like bones. 

            Here, there was nothing.

 

            “This place,” Angelique hissed suddenly, and kicked at the ground.  Julia watched mutely as a tiny puff of dust rose into the air.  Earth, she thought, just like our own.  How different is this world, really?  How does it even exist?  “This damned place.”  She threw her head back and screamed.  Julia winced.  The sound was high and shockingly loud.  An explosion of crows burst from the treetops, echoing Angelique’s screams, and wheeled about in crazy circles in the flawless blue sky above their heads.  “Why?  Why?  Why?”  Each word was punctuated by a stamp of her foot. 

            “Angelique,” Julia said quietly.  She put a hand on Angelique’s shoulder.  The other woman stiffened, then relaxed almost immediately.  She turned and fell against Julia, who, shocked – at Angelique for displaying emotion, and at herself for allowing her to – put her arms around her and held her while she sobbed. 

            “It isn’t fair,” Angelique sniffled.  “I know how that sounds, Julia; I know I’m behaving like a child.  I just don’t … understand.  Why are we here?  Why is Barnabas here?”

            “Because he wanted to come to this place,” Julia said.  “He wanted to find –”

            “Vicki,” Angelique whispered.  “Oh, how I hate her.”

            Julia said nothing, but her mouth began to disappear.

            “Oh, stop it,” Angelique said.  “I know what you think of me.  You don’t have to tell me.  You think I shouldn’t have … have done what I did.  But I did, and it’s over, and it can’t be undone now.  Even if Barnabas finds a thousand Victoria Winters in a thousand parallel worlds, I will always have killed her while he watched, the woman he really loves.  And nothing can change that.”  The pain showed on her features again like knives that cut into her face, and she looked away.

            Neither woman said a word.  Above them, the birds continued to scream.

            “We have to find Barnabas,” Julia said at last.  Angelique looked up at her with red-rimmed eyes, held her gaze for a long moment, then looked away and wiped her face. 

           

            “Yes,” she said.

            “Will you help me?”

            “Yes,” but almost reluctantly.

            “We’ll find Eagle Hill,” Julia said.  “Surely the Collins family has to bury their dead somewhere.  Barnabas would seek that place out.”

            “I think you’re right,” Angelique said, and sniffled.  She held out one hand.

            Julia looked at with a raised eyebrow.

            Angelique didn’t blink, didn’t drag her gaze away.

            At last Julia took her hand and squeezed it.

            They stood that way for a moment.  Finally they released each other.

            Angelique took a deep breath.  “All right,” she said, “let’s go.”

            Which was when the snarling, white-haired, shaggy thing burst from the trees and landed on all fours, directly in their path.

6

 

            Alexis couldn’t stop crying.

            She laid a hand against Daniel’s forehead; a tear fell and struck her hand and burned there.

            “Please,” she whispered, “please wake up.  Please.  For the love of god …”

            But his eyes did not open; his chest rose and fell; his lips were half-opened; but his eyes did not open.

            “Angelique?” she said, and glanced over her shoulder.

            But there was no one in the door.  She was alone in the room with her nephew, who might not survive the day.

            Sobs wracked her again.  She felt so helpless.

            She didn’t move her hand until her eyes, brimming with tears as they were, focused on her fingernails.  She raised it and held it close to her face.  Her gorge rose in her throat.  She rushed to the sink and scrubbed at her nails for several long moments.  Why had she thought Angelique was in the room?  Angelique wasn’t here.  Her lip began to tremble.

            She returned to her nephew’s side and touched his cheek again.  “Daniel,” she said tenderly, and stroked his hair.  She closed her eyes.  She was so very tired, but she couldn’t sleep.  Not yet.  Not when there was so much to do.  And this day, she thought as she left Daniel’s room with a glance over her shoulder, is endless.

7

 

            “This is the end,” Roger said, and glared with one eye into the bottom of his glass.  It was empty, damnit.  He considered crushing it; considered hurling it against the wall, but he though the glass might shred the curtains, and he liked the curtains.  He had helped Angelique picked them out, after all.

            He glanced up at her portrait.  “Tangerine,” he said.  “You insisted that they be tangerine.”  He shook his head.  “Blue.  Like ice.  To complement your eyes.”  He sighed, but fondly.  “But you insisted on tangerine.”

            He glanced toward the door; had there been a sound in the hallway?  Surely not.  His eyes traveled to the windows again, where the orange curtains fluttered slightly in the breeze that whispered through, smelling of darkness approaching and rot.  Collinwood was rotting.  Was that a surprise?  It was dead, wasn’t it.  The sun had gone down on the house of a corpse, and they were the ghosts inside it.  Or the flies.  He sneered.  That was more fitting.  The flies on the corpse.

            “They think I killed you, you know,” he said, and looked up at her visage smiling down on him beatifically.  How he longed to see her again, his chum, his lover.  “They think that I strangled you or something ridiculous during all the chaos.  Elizabeth won’t tell me so, but I read her journal, and she detailed everything so nicely, oh, neat as you please.  All her suspicions that her brother Roger, the pouf, her brother Roger the fairy killed Angelique because he could never really have her.  Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous in all your life?”  The sneer faded.  “Oh, but I loved you.  And you never knew.  You never … really knew.”

            He was glad that he hadn’t shattered his glass.  He wanted to refill it.

            He moved to the table where Angelique kept her liquors, and paused.

            The doors were open.

            His brow furrowed.

            Had the doors been open before?  No, he thought, they weren’t.  I just looked at them; I thought I heard a sound in the hall …

            Too late he remembered Maggie’s eyes, wide and glazed and dead; Buffie Harrington’s throat gaping like a mouth; and the blood, the blood, the endless blood …

            The sun was gone.  Shadows were falling all around him.

            One of them was darker and thicker near the bed.  Something white glistened there.  Something sparkled.

            “Oh no,” he said.

           

            Roger …

            Was it a real voice he heard, or did it echo only in his head?

            Roger …

            “Please,” he said.  His lips were numb; his teeth chattered.

            It came for him then; it broke from the shadows and shambled forward; it was breathing, he saw as horror bloomed inside him and burst all around like black flowers, its breast rose and fell; its eyes were wide and furious somehow, focused on him; it reached for him and its arms were white like cottage cheese, mottled with gray spots; it gasped and something dark came out of its mouth; Roger, it said, and its teeth …

            Something warm and red was running down his front; he stared at it with wide-eyed wonder as it stained his shirt and fouled his ascot.  My favorite, he thought.

            Then he died.

            It went on for a long time.

            Shadows fell languorously around they two. 

And the long day was over.

 

TO BE CONTINUED ...