Shadows on the Wall Chapter 92

SHADOWS ON THE WALL

CHAPTER 92:  Still Alive

 

 by Nicky

(Voiceover by Lara Parker):  “Collinwood as it exists in the mysterious and deadly world of Parallel Time … a time that Barnabas, Julia, and Angelique strive to leave behind.  But the former mistress of the house, returned from the dead with the help of her twin sister, may have other ideas …”

1

 

            “That doesn’t make sense in the least,” Elizabeth Collins Stoddard told her trembling daughter, but for once Carolyn trembled with excitement, not terror or exhaustion.  And there was something in her eyes – some spark that Elizabeth knew had been missing since the dissolution of her marriage and, apparently, since her cousin the vampire had turned her into his own personal snack bar – that she now realized was determination.  She began to feel calmer, warmer even, despite the chill of this darkened, rotting hallway.  Carolyn was about to open her mouth to protest when Elizabeth interjected smoothly, “but so little of what’s happened at Collinwood as of late makes any sense.  Parallel time,” she said, and smoothed out the wrinkles in her skirt.  “Do you suppose there are others here?”

            “I don’t know,” Carolyn admitted.  “Will had only just begun to do his research when we … when …”  Her voice trailed off, but she smiled bravely and tossed her long golden hair.  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter what he thought.  We’re here, and we’ll have to figure out what to do about it.”

            “I don’t know what we can do,” Liz said.  She shivered.  “This place is dreadful, Carolyn.  What kind of people could possibly live here?”

            “I think we should find out,” Carolyn said, and began to move in the direction of the doorway that lay at the end of the hall.

            But before she could reach it, it began to open slowly with a grinding, creaking sound.

            “Carolyn!” Liz hissed, and clung to her daughter, who could only watch as the door opened with fear and anticipation dancing across her face like shadows.

2

            Angelique sat before the fireplace against the far wall of the carriage house, her eyes closed, mumbling words Julia couldn’t understand, and didn’t care to.  She had been frozen like that for the past half hour in what they all prayed was not a futile attempt to discover if her powers were completely gone, or if some spark of them remained.  So far there had been no sign of success.

            “I can’t believe it,” Barnabas whispered, and Julia turned back to him.  He sat at the round mahogany table, his hands folded placidly against its surface, the silver wolf’s head cane lying across from him.  Julia had been pacing back and forth like a puma, chain smoking and cursing under her breath while he had merely sat and stared.  Now that he had spoken she felt a bloom of excitement ignite inside her, even though she knew that it was exceptionally possible that he was merely going to uttering more doomsday talk, and if he started that again, she was afraid she was going to wallop him, vampire or not.

            Lost love or not.

            Better to ignore that voice.  It had become easier and easier over the past two years.

            “What can’t you believe?” she said gently, and sat at the chair beside him.  Across the room, Angelique’s droning went on and on.

            “How she’s changed,” Barnabas said, and Julia’s eyebrows drew together for a moment before evening out.

            “Angelique?” she said, and nodded.  “I agree.”

            “All those times we fought – all the hatred and the cruelty – it’s as if none of it has happened.”

            I wouldn’t go that far, Julia thought, but she only exhaled a gray-purple stream of smoke.

            “This world,” he said.  “I don’t understand it.  Do you?”

            “Not really.  Even Eliot didn’t, not completely.  Of course, scientists have tossed around the possibility of parallel existences for years.  Schrodinger’s cat and all that.”  Barnabas nodded impatiently, and Julia suppressed a smile.  He had no idea what she was talking about, she knew that.  It reminded her of the times, just after they began his cure, how she had tried to explain about television.  And miniskirts.  And Republicans, the twentieth century equivalent.  He had given her that same blank-faced stare. 

           

            “But this place … it feels different to me,” he said.  “Can’t you feel it?”

            “I haven’t been here as long as you have.”

            “But you do feel it?”

            “I feel something,” Julia admitted.  “But I don’t know what it could possibly be.  Unless it’s just the miasma of evil that exists at our Collinwood as well.  Only … it is different, I’ll grant you that.”

            “That’s what I mean.  I think that it’s a trap, Julia.”

            “A few minutes ago, you thought it was hell,” she said archly.

            He glared at her for a moment, then smiled softly, sheepishly.  “I am not willing to give up that hypothesis either.”

            “You are not in hell, Barnabas,” Julia said.  She laid one hand over his and held it tightly.  He returned the pressure with a squeeze of his own.  “I promise you.”

 

            “Thank you, Julia.  And … thank you for coming here.  For trying to save me.  You are a good friend.”  She beamed back at him, though something in her cracked, as it always did when they discussed their “friendship.”  But he was gazing into space now, his expressions distant, dreamy.  “Perhaps the best friend I’ve ever had.”

            “I care about you,” Julia whispered.  Her voice shivered and cracked.

            Barnabas squeezed her hand again.

            “And I care about you,” he said.

            Angelique’s chanting hesitated.

            Barnabas pulled his hand away, and something inside Julia went with it.  She wanted to lay her head down and weep, but that was weak, and she was not a weak woman.  Two years at Collinwood, past, present, and parallel had showed her that.  “We will face this thing together,” Barnabas said as he rose from the table, “you and me and Angelique.  The time for weakness – for sniveling and for self-recriminations – is over.”

            “You sound stronger, Barnabas,” Julia said.

            “If I do, it’s because of you,” he said gravely.  “Because you came to this place to find me.  Because you believe in me.”

            “Oh Hecate,” Angelique cried from the fireplace, and Barnabas and Julia exchanged the same terrified glance, then rushed to her side.

            “Angelique, are you –” Barnabas said, then froze.

            “Oh my god,” Julia said.  The cigarette dropped from her nerveless fingers.

            Angelique’s face was beaming, ecstatic.  Her eyes were completely black and tiny scribbles of emerald energy crackled between her fingertips.  “I think I’ve found something,” she said, then threw her head back and screamed.

 

3

            “Because I have to,” Sebastian said, and threw his shirt onto the floor of their bedroom.

            “I won’t let you go.”  Chris Collins was adorable when determined, Sebastian thought, but he wasn’t about to let his boyfriend’s adorableness get in the way of what he had to do.

            Roxanne was waiting, was outside at this moment, and she had been very specific about Sebastian’s role in her plan, and what Christopher’s part would be if he did not cooperate.

            “Baby,” Sebastian said, and kissed him on the mouth, “you don’t have a say in this.”  He backed off and began to fumble with his belt.

            “What is happening up there?” Chris cried.  Frustration made his voice crack like an adolescent’s.  “What’s going on in that creepy old house that is so important?  To Tom?  To you?  To this Roxanne person, whoever she is?”

            “Can’t tell you,” Sebastian said.  He stepped out of his pants and stood there naked.  “I’m sorry, babe.  It’s dangerous that you know as much as you do.  And I don’t want you to get hurt.”

            “I grew up in that house.  Nothing there can hurt me.”

            “I wish I could believe that,” Sebastian said, and then the change happened. 

            Chris made an aggravated sound and turned away.  “That’s what I get for falling in love with a werewolf,” he muttered, but Sebastian was already gone.  Through the window, of course.

 

            Chris’s brow furrowed, then his mouth grew thin.  A moment later and he threw on his old trenchcoat and threw open the door to their apartment.  If Sebastian thought that he could do this all by himself, that Chris was just going to sit at home worrying like one of the widows in those stupid old legends, then he had another think coming. 

           

            And so thinking, he stepped out into the foggy night.

4

            The thing in the corner of the shadowed, spider-ridden room was still chanting, and Alexis watched it with only a hint of nervousness on her face.  The nervousness that the others in the house had taken note of – and rolled their eyes at, she thought grimly – had been an act, true, for the most part.  But the turmoil growing inside her now was genuine.  It wasn’t the sight of her dead twin sister risen from the grave – that had taken some getting used to, granted, but she had managed to raise Angelique months ago, and after several stabbings and dismemberments, a decomposing corpse didn’t look so bad anymore – but the thought of what they were going to do. 

Finally.

            “Anything I can do?” Alexis called.  The corpse-thing threw her a furious glance over its shoulder.  At least she thought it was furious.  Angelique’s expressions had become nearly impossible to gauge since her return from the dead.

            It was better to shut up.  Alexis understood that.  And that was her role, wasn’t it?  Angelique was the star, Angelique was the shining one, the one everybody adored, had always adored, since they were children.  Alexis was okay with that – she really was.  Why else would she risk so much to bring Angelique back from the dead?   She had tried to explain that to their dear departed stepfather, the late and unlamented Timothy Stokes, whose dabbling in the occult had reaped benefits that not even he had foreseen.  Certainly he hadn’t expected Angelique’s shambling corpse to emerge from the shadows of this very same room that Alexis had led him to; certainly he hadn’t foreseen the way the knife she held had entered his gut and moved upward with a strength that no one, least of all Alexis herself, suspected she possessed. 

            “We need one more.”  Angelique’s voice sounded gritty, as if her throat were full of earth and worms.  For all Alexis knew, it probably was.

            “One more?” she whispered.

            “It isn’t enough.”

            “But I’ve already given you so much,” Alexis cried.  “Buffie, Maggie, Father, Roger, Damion Edwards –”

            “You turned Damion into a vampire.”

            Alexis’s face crimsoned.  “It was an accident,” she said, pouting.

            “You made him useless to us.”

            “I didn’t mean to,” she whispered.

            “I don’t care.  We need one more.”

            “Who?” Alexis said.  “There isn’t anyone else!”

            “There are many options.  Mrs. Stoddard.  Carolyn.”  An inhuman eagerness infected its grating voice.  “Victoria.”  Alexis put her face in her hands, but the thing was insistent.  “Yes.  I want her.  I should have had her long ago.  She is powerful, but not powerful enough to fight against me.”  It tried to laugh, but the sound was squealing, porcine.  “Bring me Victoria Collins.  Do you think you can manage that?”

            “She’ll destroy me.”

 

            “Not if you’re clever.  Can you be clever, Alexis?”  The thing reached for, its fingers tipped with bare bones, the remaining flesh purple in places and spongy-black in others.  “Or do you want me to touch you?  Is that what you want, sister dear?  To feel my touch at last … the touch of the true death?”

            “No,” Alexis moaned, and scuttled away from the horror that loomed over her, all glaring blue eyes and death-stench.  “No, please!”

            “Then bring me who I want.  The stars have aligned, as I prophesized they would.  Another death, and I shall be restored – and then I will rule Collinwood with Quentin at my side … as it was meant to be.”  It threw out one hand towards the door, pointing with one bony finger.  Alexis’s stomach did slow flip-flops as she heard the sound of flesh splatting against a distant wall.  “Now go.  And do not fail me, Alexis.  Sister.  Or you will wish you were dead hours before I finally let you die.”

            Tears streaming down her face, Alexis went, and left her sister-thing to continue chanting in her wake.

5

 

            “Will!” Carolyn cried, and flew into his arms before she could stop herself.

            “Whoa, whoa, whoa!”  Willie Loomis took Carolyn by the shoulders and held her back from him so he could look at her.  “Carolyn, what’s gotten into you?”

            “I’m just so glad to see you!” she cried.  “So you’ve gotten here too!”

            “Well, I shouldn’t be,” Willie said, “and neither should you.  Professor Stokes sent me up here to check on … that room.”  He shivered.  Carolyn and Elizabeth exchanged frightened glances.  “He thinks it’s better if everyone stays at the Old House until … you know.”

            “Know what, Will?” Carolyn asked.

            “Why are you calling me that?” he asked, squinting.  “Did you do something different to your hair?”

            “Tell me about what Professor Stokes wants,” Carolyn said.

            Willie sighed.  “Professor Stokes thinks that Barnabas and Julia got swallowed up by that room somehow.  I don’t understand it.  Not really.  Science and magic.  It’s too much for me.”  He ran a hand through his tangled mop of shaggy, sandy hair.  Carolyn couldn’t take her eyes off him.  He was so much like her ex-husband … and yet not, at the same time.  There was a confidence that her Will evinced that was completely lacking in this man.  Something about the eyes.  And yet … and yet …

            “What about science and magic, Will?” Elizabeth said in her most imperious voice, the one she had not used since Paul and Matthew Morgan had eloped.

            “Gosh, Mrs. Stoddard, you too?”  Willie held open his hands helplessly.  “Look, you know me.  I don’t understand none of this sh –, er stuff.  But the Professor, he thinks that this room – the bad one – that it’s, like, some kind of gateway.  To another dimension or something, I dunno.  But he thinks it can take people if they’re standing inside it and bring them to a different world, whether they wanna go or not.  And so he sent me to collect everyone – to get you and Carolyn and David – and to bring them back to the Old House until he can figure out a way to get Barnabas and Julia back.”

 

            “Barnabas and Julia,” Carolyn whispered, and smiled triumphantly at her mother.  It was all making so much sense.  South America? Carolyn thought, and giggled to herself.  Why would he ever think we would believe he was from South America?

            “Come on, Carolyn,” Willie said, and took her by the arm, “Mrs. Stoddard –”

            “LOOMIS!” a voice thundered, and Willie released Carolyn’s arm with a mouse-like squeak.

            Roger Collins stood in the doorway behind them, his face full of thunder, his arms folded across his chest.

            “Uncle Roger!” Carolyn cried and ran for him, but he held out one hand.

            “Not now, Kitten,” Roger said, but his eyes were trained only on Willie.  He began to grin.  “What are you doing up here, Loomis?”

            Willie’s face grew paler and paler until it was nearly translucent.  “M-Mr. Collins,” he whispered.  “Mr. Collins, no –”

            “Get out of here at once,” Roger said.  His grin became a sneer.  “Or must I force you to go –?”

            “Mrs. Stoddard,” Willie whispered, “Carolyn … my god, we have to run … we have to –”

            “NOW!” Roger thundered, and reached out with one hand to touch Willie’s face.

            That was all it took.  Willie screamed, a high, frightened sound like a rabbit makes when trapped, and in the next moment he fled, still screaming, through the door behind Roger.

            “What happened?” Carolyn said.  “Why did he react to you like that?”

            “The man is a coward,” Roger said.  “Is he not like that in your own time?’

            Carolyn blanched.  “In our own –”  Her brow furrowed and her lower lip trembled furiously.  “You know!” she cried accusingly.

            “Professor Stokes sent me,” Roger said, sneering still.  “He was able to figure out that the barrier between worlds had been breached again, so he sent me to find you.”

            “To do what?” Carolyn cried angrily.  “You aren’t my Uncle Roger … don’t you touch me!”

            “I’m here to help you,” Roger said soothingly.  “Don’t be afraid.  I won’t hurt you.  Eliot knows exactly what to do … how to send you back, and how to bring back Barnabas and Julia as well.”

 

            “He does?” Elizabeth said.  “Oh, does he really?”  Elizabeth dug her fingers into Carolyn’s arm.  “Oh darling, it sounds too good to be true.”

            “I think so too, Mother,” Carolyn said.  “Far too good.  I don’t trust him.”

            “I want to go home,” Elizabeth said.  “Don’t you?”

            “Just like The Wizard of Oz,” Roger grinned.  “Only without the tiresome barking dog.”  He fumbled in his pocket for a moment, then extended his hand to Carolyn.  Something rested there.

            Carolyn squinted at it, then lifted her angry eyes back to Roger’s.  “It’s a coin,” she said.  “Just an ordinary coin.”

            “I thought so too,” Roger said.  “But it isn’t. It’s old – ancient, one might say.  Stokes says it causes the room to change when the proper incantations are said.  Or in this case, just one word.”  Carolyn squinted at it, squinted at his face, then turned away. 

            “I don’t trust you,” she said and folded her arms across her breasts.  “There’s something wrong with you.  I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it.   I –”

            But Elizabeth had reached out and seized the coin from Roger’s hand.  “I’ll do it,” she said.  “Whatever needs to be done.  Please.  Let me.”

            “One word,” Roger said.  He backed out of the room and stood in the doorway just outside.  “Opens the barrier.  Sends you back.  Simple.”  He closed his eyes.  “Transfero,” he said, and opened them.  “Simple.”

 

          

            “Mother, be careful, please –” Carolyn’s eyes darted nervously from the coin in her mother’s hand to Roger’s face, which held a trace of cruelty that she had never seen in her uncle in her own time. 

            “Give it to Barnabas,” Roger said, and his face narrowed, “and the witch with him.  It’s a tricky magic.  Might not work exactly as it –”

            “Transfero,” Elizabeth said.

            “—ought to,” Roger said, but he was speaking to an empty room.  Carolyn and Elizabeth had disappeared.

            His grin resurfaced … and then he wasn’t Roger Collins any longer.  Roger had been dead for awhile now, since Vicki had obliterated him during her assault on Collinwood. 

            “It is good,” the thing that had masqueraded as Roger’s ghost whispered.  Its voice burbled and chuckled and it rubbed hands together that weren’t really hands at all as it sang, “Come home, come home, come home …”

6

            “Don’t make this any harder than it already must be,” Alexis sniped.

            Victoria, who had set her book down on the drawing room table beside her chair next to the fireplace, looked up, saw who stood before her, then rolled her eyes.  “You must be joking,” she said, her voice dripping with boredom.  “Am I going to have to suffer through this again?”

            “Angelique requires that you die,” Alexis said.  She sounded almost apologetic.  “I have to help her, Victoria.  And so do you.”

            Victoria rose out of the chair, still smiling pleasantly.

            Her eyes went black.

            “You know,” she said, and took a step toward Alexis, “I think I’ll just help myself.”

7

            “We must hurry,” Angelique said.  Her eyes were still black, but the energy between her fingers had dissipated somewhat.  Only thin green scribbles remained, dancing lighting on her fingertips.  “I can’t maintain my grip on the power.  It’s too tenuous … too unstable.  I don’t know how long it will last.”

            They stood outside the front door of Collinwood, and Barnabas looked up at the great house, so similar to the one he knew.  But it wasn’t his Collinwood, had never been his Collinwood.  Just as the people there were strangers.

            But they aren’t!  I feel that they aren’t!

 

            It was too complicated for him to fully fathom.  How was it possible that they were and they weren’t people he knew, cared for?  Before, when he traveled to 1897 to help Vicki prevent the tragedy in 1967 from occurring, he had cared for the people in that time – Judith, Edward, Jamison, little Nora.  But it was more than that too – without them, if events were changed too much, then the family he knew and loved in the present would cease to exist.

            That wasn’t the case this time.  There was no connection between his Collinwood and the Collinwood of this time … was there?

            “I’m afraid that there is,” a woman’s voice said, and a moment later Roxanne Drew stepped from the shadows.

            “Great,” Julia muttered, and ground her cigarette out beneath her heel.

            Angelique’s dark eyes narrowed.  “What are you doing here?” she hissed.

            “Trying to save your lives, you idiot,” Roxanne snapped, then turned to Barnabas.  “Mr. Collins,” she said, her voice softening, “please listen to me.  It isn’t safe here.  You have to leave immediately.  Something terrible is about to happen –”

            “We don’t care,” Angelique said.  “We don’t care about you or your world.  We just want to go home.”

 

            Roxanne ignored her.  “You are wrong about this world,” she said to Barnabas, who watched her as if hypnotized.  “What happens in your own world can wring terrible changes here, and vice versa.  Already your presence here has affected your own world.”

            “How?” Barnabas said.  “Tell me!  Who are you?  How do you know what you do?”

            “There isn’t time,” Roxanne cried, and glanced over her shoulder at the front door of the great house.

            But Barnabas put a gentle hand on her shoulder.  “Please,” he said, with no trace of the vampire or its power coloring his words or his actions.

            Roxanne studied his face … then nodded.  “Fine,” she said softly.  “I’ll tell you.  Then we must go.  You aren’t safe here.  None of us are.”

            “Tell us who you are, Roxanne,” Julia said.  Angelique rolled her eyes and turned away, but listened nevertheless.

            “I exist in this place due to the beneficence of Count Petofi,” she said, and all three raised their eyebrows.  Hastily, she said, “This is a parallel world to your own, remember that.  In this world, Count Petofi has all the powers of his counterpart in your time, but he used those powers to better this world … to help people.”  She lowered her head.  “Just as he helped me.  I was dying, you see.  In the year 1840.  Petofi was here to help a man name Quentin Collins protect his family from a villain who threatened them all.  I had been coughing blood for months, and I had very little time left.  Petofi … offered me a deal.  If I helped him, he would cure me.  He did, and I did, and he was able to save the Collins family from the evil of Gerard Stiles.”

            Julia and Angelique met glances, then shrugged.  The name meant nothing to Julia, but Angelique … had there been a flicker of recognition?

            “How?” Barnabas asked, but he already knew.

            Roxanne smiled.  “I know that you do,” she said.  “Because there is a Quentin in your time, and he benefited from Petofi’s powers just as I did.  He commissioned a portrait to be painted of me.  It preserved me, drained the illness from me, kept me eternally young.”  She tossed her titian hair.  “The rest is all me.  I developed my own powers that had always existed but lay dormant until Petofi performed his miracle.  Telekinesis, telepathy, teleportation.  These are all strengths of mine, and I have used them to help the Collins family as the decades have rolled by.  And as the years have passed, I learned about the origin of this world.”

            “Hasn’t it always existed?” Julia asked.

            Roxanne shook her head.  “No,” she said, “and that is why it is an abomination.  It should not exist, and yet it does, and so do all of us.  Until the year 1692, my world and yours were one and the same.”

            “What happened in 1692?” Angelique asked.  Her voice trembled.

            “Something in your time,” Roxanne said, “something that I have never been able to understand fully.  All I know is that it involved the Collins family and a man from the town … a man named Judah Zachery.”

            “Judah Zachery!” Angelique gasped.  Her face blanched with terror, even though her eyes continued to crackle black.

 

            “Do you know him?” Julia asked.

            “He was a warlock,” Angelique said.  “I … I knew of him, of course.  But I didn’t know that he had been involved with the Collinses.”

            “Whatever involvement he had with them,” Roxanne continued, “it divided the worlds.  Ours split from yours at some point that year, and ever after that the worlds have affected each other.  One event causes an echo in the other, and back and forth and back and forth it goes.

            “But things are changing.  This world is breaking down.  It came second, you see, so it’s never been as … oh, as there, as real as your world.”

            “And you want to save it?” Julia asked.

            “I want to destroy it,” Roxanne said, and smiled.  “There is no way to save it, Dr. Hoffman.  It is cancerous, diseased … just as I was.  And just like me, it shouldn’t exist now.  I told you – it is an abomination, and as long as it exists, it will continue to infect your world.”

            “The Collins family curse,” Barnabas whispered.

            “Yes,” Roxanne said immediately.  “The Collins family is cursed here, just as yours is.  Destroying this would … may help end the curse.”  Angelique’s eyes narrowed slightly at Roxanne’s hesitation.

            “But … but all the people here,” Julia cried, “you’ll kill them all if you succeed!  They will all die!”

           

            “They don’t really exist now,” Roxanne said, and smiled apologetically.

            Then her eyes went wide.

            “Roxanne?” Barnabas asked.

            She opened her mouth ... and a long, black stream of blood like mulch exploded from her, spattering across Barnabas’s face in patterns like Chinese ideograms. 

            Julia screamed.

            A long, thin blade had emerged from the center of Roxanne’s chest.  It pointed at them like a long, thin finger.

 

            “That isn’t completely true,” Quentin Collins said from behind her.  He pulled the blade back with a slight snkk sound.  Roxanne turned to stare at him, her eyes wide and wounded, her mouth wet, gaping.  Then her eyes clouded, glazed, and her body dropped heavily to the flagstones at their feet.  Blood trickled in a black stream from the corner of her mouth.  Julia screamed again.  “I think we all exist just fine, thank you.”  He glanced at Barnabas, Julia, and Angelique and grinned mindlessly.  “Except for poor Roxanne, of course.  Now, you three.”  He held up the blade and slashed the air with it three times.  “What are we going to do with you?”

 

TO BE CONTINUED ...