Shadows on the Wall Chapter 94

Shadows on the Wall

CHAPTER 94:  Jiggedy Jig

by Nicky

(Voiceover by Grayson Hall):  “The last night in Parallel Time, that dimension so like and yet unlike our own, a world that shouldn’t exist:  Barnabas, Julia, and Angelique, trapped in a burning room with lycanthrope Sebastian Shaw, face death again, this time at the hands of an insane Quentin Collins.  But Angelique has discovered a solution that may bring them back to their own world – but even if they do manage to return safely, what new horrors await them?  What new terror will reach out for them with wizened hands to destroy them all?”

1

            Chanting.

            Words, rhythmic, and heat

            or imagined

            only imagined

            no heat, not possible, no flesh, no bones, heat

            to feel

            is impossible.

            But the chanting –

            “Emperor Lucifer, master of all the revolted spirits, I entreat thee to favor me in the adjuration which I address to thee …”

            No no no no no no no not again no no no no no

            heat heat heat heat, oh, such heat, there had never been heat like this –

“I beg thee, O Prince Beelzebub, to protect me in my undertaking. O Count Astaroth!  Be propitious to me, and grant me the powers I require –”

           

the heat and the chanting

           

the chanting –

2

             “So hot,” Julia Hoffman groaned, “so, so hot –”  She was burning; she could feel the flames dancing and bubbling her skin, inside her skin.  She would never be cool again.  People were talking somewhere but she couldn’t understand them.  Where was Quentin? she wondered; where was the torch?  Had he struck her with it?  Was she already dead?  Was this really – finally – hell?  Her body twisted and writhed, and someone held it tightly against themselves.

            Julia.

            That voice – she knew that voice.

            Julia, come back to me.

            The heat was beginning to fade.  It had, she decided, never really existed to begin with.

            She opened her eyes.

            “Barnabas,” she said, and smiled.  She reached a hand up, trembling, barely trembling, like a feather, and touched his cold, cold cheek.  “You found me.”

 

            “Always,” he said, smiling back.

            “Are we dead?”

            A shadow flickered across his face.  “Not … you,” he managed, and dropped his gaze.

            Julia lifted her head and groaned.  She touched the back of her skull, but there was nothing – no holes, no missing hair, nothing, god help her, charred.  She tried to sit up, but a wave of dizziness nearly overcame her.  Nevertheless, she forced herself out of Barnabas’ arms.  She planted her hands on the floor, squinting, and saw that there was no longer any carpet, that the bare floorboards sinking chunks of grit and skeins of cobweb into and over her palms belonged to the Parallel Time room – the one at Collinwood – the one of her own time.

            Relief and panic struck her simultaneously, and she scrabbled to her feet.  “We have to get out of this room,” she bleated at the same moment she saw Angelique cradling a naked and very human Sebastian Shaw and glaring at her.  “Before it changes,” Julia added, “before it takes us back to that … place.”

            “We are safe,” Angelique said steadily.  Julia’s brow creased, her mouth opened to bark out a protest, when Angelique added, smooth as silk, “For the moment only.”  She stood up, then glanced down at Sebastian.  A line appeared briefly between her eyebrows, and she held out a hand to him.  “Sebastian,” she said, “we have to leave this place.  Julia is right.  It could take us back to that other world at any moment.”

            His lips curled, then twisted, revealing his teeth.  “No,” he said with some effort.  “Not – never – again.  I won’t –”  He groaned.  “I won’t go back there.”

            “Then take my hand.  You must.”

 

            He glared up at her and then, with a great grimace and gritting his teeth, extended her his hand.  She hauled him to his feet; he moved away from her quickly, shaking his head.  “Christopher,” he moaned, “Christopher, oh.”

            Julia’s head throbbed as a particularly wicked spike of pain sliced through her skull, and, nearly blinded, she stumbled toward the door that led from the Parallel Time room back out into the East Wing.  “Hurry,” she croaked.  She opened the door, gesturing wildly, and Sebastian went first, then Angelique, then Barnabas.

            Barnabas paused once outside the door.  “Julia?” he asked quietly.  “Julia, are you --?”  His eyes widened.

            “What is it?” Julia asked.  Her eyes widened.  Barnabas’s nostrils were flaring, and she could see, through his lips, his fangs were protruding at the same moment she felt a winding, serpentine trickle of hot liquid wend its way from her nostril.

           

            She touched it gingerly, then looked down.  A brownish-red streak glittered up at her from her fingertips.

            “My nose –” she began –

             – and the room gave a great hitch –

            “JULIA!” she heard Barnabas roar –

 – but she was falling and flying at the same time, and she could no longer hear him, could no longer feel –

3

             His bedroom at the Old House was uncomfortably small, and of course the lack of electricity made him crazy.  How could he play his radio without electricity?  It didn’t use batteries and Aunt Elizabeth wouldn’t let him go to the village, not even to Brewster’s, to pick up a wireless radio; now all David Collins had to chase the shadows away was the candle that flickered in the window overlooking the portico and the front lawn.

           

            The candle …

            He found that he was drawn to it again, as he always seemed to be, even though the nights as summer began its slow advance were warm.  Still, it held him, fascinated him.

            He ran his hand over its surface and smiled.  His skin blackened, but it was only soot.  He was unharmed.  He hadn’t even felt the slightest spear of pain.

            His smile became a grin.  He wasn’t likely to be disturbed now.  Aunt Elizabeth was in her room where she spent most of her time these days; Carolyn was downstairs doing something weird, but he hadn’t asked for any details; Cousin Quentin was … well, who knew?

            And Amy is dead.  And Vicki is dead.  And Father is dead.

            His smile vanished.  Only a month had passed since the events of that terrible night, but the pain, the pain he eluded as he played his stupid games with the candle, that other pain, which was some more real and more painful than any physical pain he had ever felt – that pain had returned.

            His eyes burned as they had with more or less regularity over the past thirty days, and, snuffling, he wiped them away with the cuff of his pajama shirt and turned away from the candle and the window and began to plod toward bed.

            Roger Collins had never been a model father, but he was the only one David knew, and he missed him.  And he missed Amy and he … yes, he even missed Vicki.  He understood more than the grownups gave him credit, and he knew that, whatever had happened to Vicki at the end, she wasn’t herself.  The real Vicki – the one he had known for a year, since she came to Collinwood last June to be his governess, that Vicki would never have said the horrible things the monster in the drawing room said that night, nor would she had hurt anybody, certainly not Roger, certainly not David.

            He was crying again, like a big baby.  Well, that was okay.  There was no one around to see him or hear him.  He would crawl under the covers and pull them over his head and cry for his father and for his friend and for Vicki. 

            He stopped suddenly, half-way between the window and bed.  Something in the air – some scent – something familiar, yes?  Yes, familiar …

            “Mother?” he said for no reason at all, and looked around the room eagerly.

            He was alone.

            His mother did not appear.  He knew that she would not.

            A sob trembled in his chest, and David Collins drew in a great draught of air and aimed it all at the candle.

            The flame took it, flickered, and died.

 

            Crying furious tears, David flung himself onto his bed and pulled the covers up tightly over his head, shielding his face from the foreign room that was not his own, muffling his angry sobs, and so it was that he didn’t notice the candle across the room, never saw how the air before it rippled once, as with great heat, the exhalation of a dragon perhaps, and how, unseen, the candle flickered back into life.

            It burned all the rest of that night, steadily.

4

 

“We have to find her,” Barnabas snarled; his fangs were protruding, he could feel them, and when he glanced down at his hands, he found they had begun to gnarl and twist into the claws of an animal.  His eyes widened with shock; this was a completely new manifestation of the curse; embarrassed, unsure, he swung his arms behind his back and clasped his horrible new monster hands together, twining them tightly so that Angelique and Sebastian, who had rejoined him in the Parallel Time room, could see.

Angelique’s reply was waspish.  “That may prove to be rather difficult,” she said, “seeing as we haven’t the first clue as to how she disappeared, her new whereabouts not withstanding.”

            “I suggest we leave this room at once,” Sebastian said, and they both turn to look at him, glaring.  He returned their glares, his eyes a frosty blue.  “If Dr. Hoffman was pulled back into my … into that other time, there isn’t much we can do for her now.”

            “How dare you –” Barnabas roared, but Angelique laid a cool hand on his shoulder – he could feel the ice emanating off her in waves, even through the thick cloth of his coat – and said quietly, “Sebastian is right, Barnabas.  We’ll make a plan, I promise you that, but for now … none of us are safe in this room.”

            He glanced around, his features pained, then finally nodded.  Julia, he thought, dear friend, old, dear friend, and said, “You’re … you’re right, of course.  I apologize, Mr. Shaw, for my outburst.”  And, trembling, he stepped out of the Parallel Time room and into the corridor.  As Sebastian followed, Barnabas, struck by a sudden wry amusement, said, “We’ll have to do something about securing some trousers for you.  Perhaps Mrs. Johnson can –”

            But whatever he was about to say next was drowned out by the monstrous shriek that fell from Angelique’s lips as she crossed the threshold of the room; the force of the sound, amplified to an ear-splitting level, blew both vampire and werewolf backward against the far wall.  Barnabas, dazed, shook his head and looked up.

 

            Angelique continued to scream, but Barnabas couldn’t determine whether the sound was one of pain or ecstasy, or both.  As he watched, blackness fell over her like an inky shadow, darkening her hair into instant obsidian, coloring her eyes until they glistened like pools of oil, and spreading like branches of veins across her face, only the veins were the same mystical symbols they had observed covering her skin before, when she had first donned the Mask of Ba’al.  Black lightning crackled between her fingers; her skin was white as salt.

            “Make … her … stop!” Sebastian roared, but his voice was almost completely lost in the depths of that inhuman wail.

            But Barnabas couldn’t answer.  He found that his vision was blurring, and there was hot wetness streaming down his cheeks.  The scalding liquid twined into the corner of his mouth and bloomed there, hot and salty, on his tongue, and he knew with sudden horror that he was weeping tears of blood.

            The screaming stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and Angelique sagged against the wall, supporting herself with one chalky white hand.  Her coal-black eyelashes fluttered against her coal-black eyes.  Her darkened lips pursed, and she whispered, “B-Barnabas?”  The dark magic sparkled and crackled against her teeth, on her tongue, far back in the cavern of her throat.  She was suffused with it, and the carpet scorched beneath her feet.

            “Your powers,” he managed, “your powers have returned.”

            “So they have,” she gasped, then curled her terrible black mouth into a smile of satisfaction.  She made an arcane gesture with her right hand, and suddenly Sebastian was fully clothed in a gray flannel suit.

            He glowered and shook his head.  “Squaresville,” he said dourly. 

            “You can use them to find Julia,” Barnabas said.  “Quickly, Angelique!”

            “She is nowhere on this plane of existence,” Angelique said instantly. 

            “How do you –”

            Her eyes snapped.  “You always underestimate me, Barnabas.  My powers are stronger than ever before, can’t you understand that?  I could feel Julia if she were here, and she is not.”  Her brow furrowed; her voice, somehow, softened.  “But I don’t know where she is, either.”

            “Can’t you find her?”

 

            She narrowed her inhuman eyes.  “I can try.”  She raised her arms to the ceiling, spreading her fingers, and uttered a quick, guttural stream of words that Barnabas had never heard before, but that raised goosebumps all over his skin.  Slowly – slowly – she began to rise off the floor; her toes dragged against the dirty wooden boards, scraping like nails across slate, then even those left the earth and she continued to rise, and her entire body glowed with alternating pulses of dark and light, dark and light.

            She opened her eyes.

           

            Barnabas gasped.

           

            They were blue-gray-green, shards of crystal, nary a spot of blackness or crackle of dark within them.

            And she settled back to earth.

            And said, “I’m sorry, Barnabas.  Julia Hoffman … Julia Hoffman is gone.  She’s just … gone.”

5

            “Maintain.”  His voice was stern but not unkind, a teacher’s voice.  Comforting.  “Maintain.  Allow the warmth to spread from the crystal into yourself.  Through the web of skin at your fingertips, into the nest of veins beneath, and through the veins into your blood.  And beyond.” 

            The crystal’s point – poised on the table top beneath her, a shard nearly the size of her lower arm, and when she saw it the first time she had, well, there was no other word for it; she had gawped – barely brushed the tips of her fingers, outstretched, the hands together, arms at length.  She breathed steadily, as he had instructed her to do, in through the nose, hold for a moment, out through the mouth, then repeat and repeat and repeat.  Clear your mind, he told her, clear your mind; let everything go.

            Let everything go.

            Oh, if only it were that simple –

            scream red cut blood

            He sensed her sudden distress.  “Maintain,” he said again, his voice only the slightest bit sharper with the force of his command.

            Her breath caught. 

            But only for that moment.

            In through the nose, hold; out through the mouth, in through the nose; hold; out through the mouth …

            She was doing it; she was maintaining.  The memories

            Tony’s face, his sweet sweet face, blood running from his mouth his ears his eyes

were fading … fading …

            Gone.

            She was breathing; she could feel the warmth of the crystal in her fingertips; she could feel it begin its song again.  The warmth spread up through her, just as he had told her it would, through her fingers, into her blood, warming her bones.  And beyond.  Yes, there was still a beyond for the crystal to warm.  She was smiling, she knew suddenly, involuntarily, but she was smiling.

            “Allow the warmth to touch your mind.  The barest feather against your thoughts, the conscious ones that lie on the surface.”  A hesitation.  “Can you feel it?”

            “Yes.”  She could; it was easy now.  Her breathing came naturally, as though she were sleeping.  Her chest rose and fell. 

            “Your thoughts are a river.  There is a tide that pulls you along.  The crystal is your anchor; it will hold you so that you do not become lost.  Do you believe that?”

            “Yes.”

            “You are not bound by your body.  You are not bound by this room, or by this house or by this earth.  Do you believe that?”

            “Oh, yes.”

            “Find the tide.  Ride along.  Where does it take you?”

            The images that flashed before her were different now, not at all from that time of her life, the year she had spent in thrall to … to a beast.  There was no other word for it.

            Didn’t matter now.  She was in control.  For the first time in her life, truly, she was in control.

            The tide pulled her along (and she felt the crystal at her fingertips, safe and warm and solid), and she felt something inside her, something terrible and tight, suddenly turn and break, and she opened her arms and soared, she was free, she was in the tide, she was the tide, and she flew and she flew, and she saw –

            “A meadow,” she said.  “There’s a meadow.  There is no house, there is no one there.  Only waves and waves of grass, and flowers, yellow and blue, and a small brook.  Oh, it’s beautiful.  It’s so peaceful.”

            “Do you know where this meadow lies?”

            “No –”  She felt herself frowning, couldn’t seem to stop.  “But it’s familiar.  It all seems so familiar, so real.”

            “Find the when.  Try to find the when.”

            She was the tide, she was the tide.

            “Ago,” she said instantly.  “Long ago.  I can smell the sea; I can hear it, the waves crashing against the shore –”  Amazement turned her mouth into a perfect O.  “There’s Widow’s Hill!  I can see Widow’s Hill!”

            “Maintain!”

            She relaxed back against the table; before her, the scene spread out gloriously:  the endless expanse of green, the woods beginning like a giant dark belt of shifting emeralds and browns encircling the meadow, the happy gurgling of the brook, and, rising higher, the cruel gray of the ocean and its serrated teeth that gnashed against the stones at the base of Widow’s Hill.  “It’s Collinwood,” she said.  “Or … or where Collinwood will stand, someday.”

            “Amazing.”

            “There’s … there’s a woman.”

            “Indeed?”

            “She’s young.  Dark hair.  Dark eyes.  Oh, she’s beautiful.  She’s kneeling by the brook.  Her hands are in the water; she’s tasting the water.  Her clothes are ragged, but she doesn’t seem unhappy.  It’s such a gorgeous day; how could anyone be unhappy on a day like that?”

            “And there is no one else with her?”

            “Not that I can see.  Oh … oh, wait.  There’s a … a shadow.  It fell over her just now. There’s a shadow over everything.  She’s looking up – she’s terrified, not just startled, but terrified – it’s a man, a man she knows, a man who scares her –”

            “Can you see him?”

            “No … no …”  But couldn’t she?  She was the tide; she was in control.  “Yes!”  Terror flooded her, both her own and the long ago girl.  “Yes, I see him!”  Her stomach twisted; bile rose into her throat and burned there.  “His eyes … oh god, his eyes – his face –”  Her voice rose into a scream and she drew her hands back from the crystal, which had begun to glow and pulse with a crimson light.  “I DON’T KNOW HIM!” she shrieked.  She rose to her feet; her eyes flew open, but they didn’t see the drawing room of the Old House where they had practiced during these sessions for the past few days, nor did they see the shocked older man before her.  “I DON’T KNOW HIM, I DON’T, I SEE HIM BUT I DON’T –”

 

            “Carolyn!” Professor Stokes cried, and at that moment the doors to the Old House were forced inward, and Carolyn sank back into her chair with a moan.

            Stokes turned furiously, his face working, to face the intruders – then he gasped.  “Barnabas!” he cried.  “Barnabas, you’ve returned!”

6

            She’s coming around.  She’s alive.  She’s coming around.

            Julia groaned.  Was this really happening again, she wondered; was this her life now, to be knocked unconscious as she transferred from world to world or time to time, suffering great thundering pains in her head that walked and that talked, only to come around dazedly while people above her calmly discussed her health and level of consciousness?

            “Julia?”

            Someone who knew her, then.  That didn’t necessarily make her feel any better; if she had returned to Parallel Time, she might open her eyes to find Angelique Stokes Collins glaring down at her, her face a burned horror but still and maddeningly alive, or Quentin Collins, cheerfully insane, ready to throttle the life from her.

            But the voice was familiar.

            “Julia, please!  Please wake up!”

            Damn it, she thought grudgingly, and opened her eyes.

            The face above hers was blurry, so she blinked, but it remained blurry still.

            Or … not blurry.  Perhaps it wasn’t blurry at all.

            The woman above her was Carolyn Stoddard – but a very changed woman from the last time Julia had seen her.  Like laying underwater, Julia thought, and gazing up into a face above you, a face looking down at you from outside the water.  The ripples will do that, the ripples will make you look … so different –

            “Oh Julia, I thought I’d never see you again!” said the woman Julia knew and did not know, the woman with silver hair cut just below her earlobes, a woman with a throat thinned and mottled by age, a woman with deep lines across her forehead and beside her eyes and cruelly creasing her mouth.

            “Carolyn,” Julia groaned, and sat up, looking around; she was in the drawing room at Collinwood, but even that had changed; where was the hideous green couch Elizabeth favored?  What was that enormous screened device in the corner, by the French windows?  “Carolyn,” Julia said again, “Carolyn, what’s happened to –”

            “You disappeared,” Carolyn said, her voice trembling and weaving, “you disappeared when everyone else came back from … from that other time, and no one ever knew what became of you.  We thought we’d never see you again!  And then … just now … you … you simply appeared!  From nowhere!”

            “Help me up,” Julia said.  “My head is pounding.”

            “You have to tell me what’s happened to you,” Carolyn said.  “Julia –”

            “Barnabas!” Julia said suddenly.  “What’s happened to Barnabas?”

            “Julia –”

            “Is he here?  Is he all right?”  She broke free from the other woman and ran as quickly as her numbed legs would allow her, threw open the drawing room doors, and called into the shadows that lay beyond in the great house, “Barnabas?  Barnabas?”

            “Barnabas isn’t here,” Carolyn said from behind her.  “Julia, you have to understand –”

            “What’s happened to you?” Julia cried, spinning around.  “Why do you look the way you do?  Where is Barnabas?  Where is anybody?”

            “Julia, you have to understand,” Carolyn said firmly.  “You must listen to me.  You never came back, and we thought you were dead.  We never dreamed that you –”

            “That I what?” Julia demanded.  Terror crawled and capered inside her throat, and she drew her hands up to her breasts, wishing for the millionth time that endless day that she had a cigarette, just one, just one simple cigarette.  “That I what?”

            “That you time travelled,” Carolyn whispered.  “Julia, this isn’t 1968.  This isn’t even the twentieth century.”

            She felt the color fall from her face.  “Dear god,” she whispered.  “What do you mean?”

            “Julia,” Carolyn said steadily, “Julia … this year …

           

            “You’ve been gone …

“… gone for forty-six years.  Forty-six years, Julia.

            “You’re at Collinwood in the year 2014.”

 

TO BE CONTINUED ...