Shadows on the Wall Chapter 100

CHAPTER 100:  Séance

by Nicky

Voiceover by Nancy Barrett:  “On this night, at the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, a séance will take place.  But it is not the only such ceremony that will occur … for three women in three separate decades, some centuries apart, tonight will be a night of terror as the doorway opens and each will see something she will take with her to her grave …”

1

Collinwood:  1840

 

            Leticia Faye sobbed.

            She couldn’t help it.  Her eyes burned; her lower lip trembled; she opened her mouth to warble to first few lines of her favorite song, her showstopper, “I’m Gonna Dance for You,” but the words wouldn’t come out.  Not even one.  And singing always, always made her feel better!

            The sky outside was black and ferocious.  Bolts of lightning split the clouds, and it was only from their illumination that she could see the woods encroaching on the great estate.  The trees didn’t look normal, and she had tried to explain this to Flora, but Flora only smiled and patted her on the head and called her a good child, and there was no way that Leticia could verbalize how the trees moved when they oughtn’t to move; how slimy they looked now, and how the branches were thinner than they had any right to be, like fingers, reaching, reaching …

            She choked back another burst of anguish and turned away from the large windows in the drawing room.  She hated them.  Anyone could be out there, she always thought, and had thought so since Gerard brought her over the threshold three months ago, when there was summer in the air and the bright promise of a future.

            “I can’t help it,” Leticia whimpered to no one in particular.  Daniel was locked securely in the tower room (for his own safety, Quentin always told her, soothing her, touching her golden hair), Gabriel and Edith were in their rooms, the children were tucked safely into their beds by their pretty new governess, and Samantha was visiting her sister in the village.

            Leticia had never felt so alone.

            “I can’t help these powers!” she cried, anguished, but there was no one in the room to hear her.  “I can’t!  Why don’t you leave me alone?  Why don’t you just g-go away?”  Her Cockney accent intensified so that her words were nearly unintelligible, even to her. 

            A séance.

            Gerard wanted to have a séance.  He had already convinced Flora to participate, that it was the best idea; “These things are happening, these murders,” he told her, and her author’s eyes had widened with fright and her entitled hands clasped together, “and we can stop them, if only we can figure out who is responsible.  The dead,” he told her, his mouth, for once, not curled into a smile, “the dead will tell us.  The dead will bring us the knowledge we seek.”

 

            But it was a terrible idea.  And if only Leticia could articulate why, why she felt that they would court such disaster if they opened up the psychic doorway, then maybe she could find the words to turn them back.

            But some things, she thought, were inevitable. 

            Which was why her powers were so frustrating.

            “I can help,” she whimpered, and heard the words – “Aye can ‘elp,” a parody of a guttersnipe, but it was how she sounded, dammit, and she couldn’t ‘elp it – “I can change things, if I can just … if I can just figure out …”

            She forced herself to calm, to breathe, in through her nose, out through her mouth.  She sank onto the sofa and closed her eyes, rubbing her index fingers against her temples.  “Let me see,” she whispered.  “Let me see … show me what it is I need if I am to stop what is to come … if I can prevent the destruction of all I love …”

            Darkness.

            The crash of thunder.

            “Please,” she whispered, eyes screwed shut.  “Please …”

            A flash.  An image.

            The foyer.  The portrait of Barnabas Collins.  Shredded, askew. 

A woman with dark hair and black eyes holding out her hands, and they held wheels of blue lightning –

            A wolf several times larger than any wolf she had ever seen, pumpkin-orange eyes, teeth like sabers, and another behind it, bristling and gray, and another, and another –

            “No,” Leticia groaned. 

            A man who looked so like the Quentin she knew and was falling more and more in love with every day, head twisted, throat a disaster, and blood, so much blood –

            A flicker of a man, not even a ghost, but solidifying as she watched, a hideous man, bald on top, eyes blazing with a zealot’s fanaticism, what few shreds of hair remaining on his head standing up, streaming around him in a spectral wind – and she knew him, though she didn’t – she saw what he was doing, what he was going to do, and she opened her eyes and her mouth and she screamed –

            “Leticia!”

            A man shaking her.  Rough hands that had loved her once, had held her tenderly, digging into her shoulders, hands that hurt –

            It was Gerard.  Looking down at her with disgust and, yes, something like hatred on his handsome face.

            Her cheeks were wet with tears.  She was trembling and she couldn’t stop.

            She opened her mouth and sobbed, “It was Judah!  Judah Zachery!  It’s all because of him that we’re cursed, cursed, and there’s nothing we can do!  Nothing!”  And then the sobbing overtook her and she collapsed against him.

 

2

Collinwood:  1796

            “The fingers must touch.”  The Countess Natalie DuPres always spoke with such authority, Joshua Collins thought, and glared in her direction, across the table from where he sat in the drawing room of the Old House, but her almond-shaped eyes were closed, and her lashes lay, delicate and curling, against her cheek.  She was, he admitted to himself grudgingly, an attractive woman; was that why he allowed her to stay, months after Josette’s suicide?  He felt a stab of shame.  Naomi was safely tucked away at Collinwood; she knew nothing of what was to occur, and it was better that way.  There was no reason for her to learn the terrible truth behind what her son – what their son – had become. 

 

Yes, Joshua thought, and drew himself up firmly, she was indeed a beautiful woman, but no matter.  There was no reason to dwell on the Countess DuPres.  Not with so much … terror occurring around them.  Better just to think of Barnabas, and what they might do to help him.

            A séance, Natalie had said, in order to reach out to the spirit realms.  “Surely you jest, madam,” Joshua had said, voice dripping with his usual amount of disdain, when she had first approached him with the idea. 

           

            She spoke back to him with that icy, imperious tone, as she always did.  “I do not jest.  I never jest.  With anything relating to the death of my beloved niece, I am in deadly, deadly earnest.”

            Abashed, he had lowered his eyes.  “I apologize,” he said, and forced his voice to soften.  Jeremiah’s death, Sarah’s, Barnabas’, Josette’s – so much destruction, so much death, and he found it increasingly difficult to wear the armor he habitually donned whenever emotion threatened too near the surface.

            But it was necessary.

            “The curse, Father,” Barnabas whispered to him in anguish, soon after Joshua discovered his secret.  “Anyone who loves me … she said that anyone who loved me would die …”

 

            It was safer this way.

            Until the curse could be removed. 

            And it will be, Joshua thought ferociously, and thought it now.

            “The fingers,” Natalie said again, more sharply this time, “must touch.”

            To touch her – that jolt, the brush of her skin against his –

            He was flushing, something he had not thought himself capable. 

            Her eyes narrowed.

            He laid his hands against the table with some haste.

            Their fingers touched.

            Natalie closed her eyes and tilted back her head.  Her dark auburn hair (like trapped fire, Joshua thought with sudden, unexpected poetry) bounced against her shoulders.  Her fingers were warm.  The entire room was warm.  Was that strange?  He expected anything supernaturally occurring to leach the room of all heat. 

            “We address the powers of the spirit world,” Natalie DuPres intoned.  “Hear us.  Show us that you watch, and that you know.  Open a gateway –”

            “NO!”

            Joshua snatched his hands back as if they were on fire.  His cheeks flamed again.  But the Countess only opened her eyes and frowned, annoyance marring her aristocratic features.  “I told you,” she hissed, “that we must not be interrupted!”

            But Joshua was already on his feet, turning to the woman who stood in the doorway of the Old House, where she most assuredly did not belong.  Her eyes were wide, her nostrils flaring like a frightened horse.  “Millicent,” Joshua said gently, and made his way as carefully as possible toward his cousin from New York, his poor mad darling, driven to this state by that scoundrel Forbes.

 

            The beautiful young woman, her hair coiled into ringlets of the most delicate spun gold, stared at him with those wide, china-blue eyes.  Her face was white, so dreadfully white.  Beyond pale.  The color of bone.  “You should not be in this house,” Millicent said in the familiar prissy, sing-song tone she had employed since her arrival some months ago for Josette and Barnabas’ wedding.  Now it was sharp and reproving as well.  “You do not belong here.”

            “Millicent,” Joshua said wearily, “you should be in your bed, back at Collinwood.  Cousin Naomi will be most distressed –”

            “I could not sleep on a night like this,” Millicent said.  “I heard the lightning.”

            Joshua closed his eyes. 

            “I heard it, Cousin Joshua, I did,” she insisted.  “And the snow.  It made such a tumult against my windowpane, and I had to look outside.  And do you know who I saw?”

            “Nothing, Millicent,” Joshua said.  Behind them, Natalie continued to send him threatening glances.  “Come with me, my dear, and I’ll take you back to Collinwood.”

            “I saw a man!” Millicent exclaimed, and clapped her hands in delight, and Joshua froze.

            “A … a man?”

            “A man who looked like Barnabas.”

            Natalie’s mouth opened.

           

            Joshua felt all the spit in his mouth dry up.  “B-Barnabas?”

            “Yes,” Millicent said reprovingly, “even though some say he is in England.  Others swear him dead.  But the man I saw – he looks so like Barnabas,” and she giggled again, and for the first time Joshua heard real madness in her voice, “and he does … he does these things…”

            “Joshua?” Natalie had risen.

            Joshua thrust out a hand back at her.  “Be still, madam!”  Gentler, he stroked Millicent’s curls, questing, pushing them back away from the slim line of her throat, exposing that marble stretch …

            He groaned.  “Barnabas,” he said, unable to help himself, “oh, Barnabas … my son … my son …”

 

            The twin red marks marring her throat glared up at him accusingly, even as Millicent jerked away from him and covered them with her hand. 

            “Joshua,” Natalie said behind him, and he took a compensatory step closer, protectively, nearer to Millicent, “Joshua, if we are to hold the séance, we must do it tonight.”

            “A séance?” Millicent whispered, then clapped her hands again.  “Yes!  Oh, yes!  How delightful!”  She frozen, then cocked her head, and her mouth went slack, as if she were listening to someone talking a great distance away.  “I want to join in,” she said. 

           

            “Out of the question,” Joshua thundered immediately.

 

            “But Cousin Joshua –”

            “Think it over, Joshua,” Natalie said in a low voice.  “Three is the proper number for a séance.  Or nine.  Or twelve.  With Millicent’s help, we can create a circle.  It will be easier to open the door, and then we can find …”  Her fingers danced nervously on the air.  “Whatever it is we find.”

            Joshua opened his mouth to protest, then his shoulders slumped.  Barnabas was the cause of Millicent’s state this night, no matter what Forbes had done to her in the past.  And there was only one way to cure her now.

            “All right,” he said.  The words pained him to speak, but he must, he must.  But Natalie already had Millicent by the elbow, was guiding her to the little table beside the fire, where the candle flames flickered as if stirred by some phantom hand.

            Barnabas … Barnabas, my son …

            Head low, boots dragging with every step, Joshua joined them, and laid his hands flat on the surface of the table.

3

Collinwood: 1897

 

            Pansy Faye was her name, and ta-ra-BOOM-de-ay was her game; or it used to be, at any rate.  Before she came to Collinwood.  Now she was using her mediumistic gifts again and they were, if she did say so herself, quite potent.

            The man before her was positively twitching with nerves.  Handsome, though.  Devilishly handsome.

            “You don’t need to be so nervous, love,” she chirped brightly, and patted one of his hands.  “There ain’t no one going to disturb us here!”

            Quentin Collins smiled ruefully.  “I’m not worried about being disturbed,” he said.  “Edward has taken the children away.  Collinwood is empty for the time being.  And the gypsies are dead, and my good friend Evan is dead.  Even pretty Miranda is nothing but bones.  No, my dear Miss Faye, having someone stumble upon our little party is the least of my concerns.”

            Her brow wrinkled up and her mouth became a tight, distasteful moue; then she breathed her delighted laughter, and drew a strong finger across his cheek, gently stroking one of his shaggy sideburns as she did.  “Love,” she giggled.  “You don’t need to worry about nothin’ with Miss Pansy Faye at your service!”

            He squinted at her.  “And you,” he said, “bear a strong resemblance to a dead woman yourself.”

            She lifted her chin defiantly.  “Pansy Faye is one of a kind.”

            Quentin sighed.  “Miss Charity Trask might disagree with you on that score.”

            “Never heard of her.”

            “She’s gone now.”

            Pansy hiccupped more laughter.  “Well of course she’s gone, guv!  If she’s dead, she’d have to be, wouldn’t she?”

            Quentin shrugged.  “Let’s get on with it,” he said darkly.  “I have a train to catch at nine.”

            “Did you bring what I asked you to bring?”  Pansy refused to allow her feathers to ruffle.  So what if Mr. Quentin Collins was about to leave town?  This was his family’s manor, wasn’t it?  With his family’s fortune nicely attached?  He’d have to return someday.  And remember:  no ring on that most important finger.

            Quentin nodded and removed a lace handkerchief from his breast pocket.  He handed it wordlessly to Pansy, who examined it.  “Fancy,” she said.  Turning it over, she saw the monogram, as delicate as the handkerchief itself, blue silk thread.  She could just tell.  She could always tell.  VW, the monogram said.  “Smells fancy too,” she said.  “Who was she, love?”

 

            Quentin’s teeth were gritted.  “Someone I love very much.”

            Pansy would not allow herself to become crestfallen.  They were about to conduct a séance, weren’t they?  Which meant that the owner of this handkerchief had already passed into the great beyond, hadn’t she?  So what if he used the present tense when referring to her, whoever she was.  Pansy had time.  Pansy could make it all better.  Her specialty.  “Her name, love.  I gotta know her name if I’m going to make contact, don’t I?”

            “Victoria,” he said, so softly she could barely hear him, “Winters.”

            “Pretty name.  She was a pretty girl, weren’t she.  Pansy knows.  Pansy always knows.”

            “Let’s get on with it.”

            “No need to be rude, love,” Pansy said, but she felt no real irritation.  Just the tingling of excitement, the barest brush of electricity she felt in the pit of her stomach and in her fingertips.  She closed her eyes and tossed back her head as dramatically as she could. 

            I’ll find you, Victoria, Quentin thought; he had spoken those to words to the love of his life only two months ago, and he meant them more than any others he had ever uttered.  She disappeared the night Petofi died, and Quentin supposed she had returned to her own time … but he had to be sure.  He had to speak to her, see her if possible, and every other avenue he tried led to a dead end.  If Magda were still alive … ah, but that way led to madness.  Magda was dead, another victim of Petofi.  She could tell him nothing.  And he had to know:  what of Victoria? 

            I can’t wait eighty years to see her, he thought, and that was probably reckless and irrational, but he was Quentin Collins, dammit!  Even if he had been forced to grow up quite a lot during the insanity that was the year 1897, he was still himself.

           

            Wasn’t he?

            But Pansy was beginning.  He tried to relax, but his body refused to obey.  Something unseen was gathering in the air around them, and whatever it was, it caused the hair all over his body to rise to attention.  He wanted to grin.  She was certainly ridiculous, this Pansy Faye, cockney showgirl and mentalist, all tarted up in rouge and lipstick and the most eye-wateringly pink gown he had ever seen … but she was the real deal.  He could sense it.

            “Spirits,” Pansy intoned, “you will hear my voice.  You will hear me and you will open the way.”

            Vicki, Quentin thought, and closed his eyes, oh Vicki …

4

Collinwood:  1840

 

            “No more sniveling,” Gerard snarled, and forced her down at the table.  Leticia cried out, but it did no good.

            “You’re hurting my arm,” she growled, and tried to sound threatening, but Gerard seemed not to hear her.  He was looking around the drawing room of the Old House, draped with cobwebs and thick with shadows.  She shuddered.  She had cried against his chest, and this was how he treated her:  dragging her out of the safety of Collinwood into the dark woods where a murderer might lie in wait, a beast who had already removed the hearts of three women in the town and left their bodies to wash up on the shore; pulling her through the black heart of the woods and up the steps and across the portico of this house, haunted, she was certain, and most assuredly long abandoned by the family for nearly fifty years.

            She looked around.  The portrait of Josette Collins, whomever she had been, a legendary family phantom, looked down at her benevolently.  Help me now, Josette, she begged silently, but there was no answer. 

            “Where is Flora?” she said sullenly, and rubbed at her throbbing arm.  There would be marks, she was certain, from where he had grabbed her so rudely.

            “She will not be joining us this evening.”  His voice was curt.  Her eyes welled with tears.  Gerard never spoke to her in such a manner!

            Not until we came to this place.

            That was true, Leticia thought darkly.  This damned, abominable place.

            “Why do you want me here?”

            “Because we are going to hold a séance,” he said, with such assurance that she had to sit up and blink at him.  Thunder rumbled outside.

            “I told you that I would take no part in it,” she said with what she hoped was equal assurance.

           

            He knelt beside her until his face was only inches away from her own.  Her breath caught in her throat and then stopped.  She couldn’t take her eyes away from his; they held her fast, the devil’s own.  “You will do what I tell you to do,” he said in a firm, even tone, as pleasant as if he were wishing her a good evening or inquiring about the weather.  “You know what I can do to you if you don’t.”

            She tried to breathe again, but her chest had become iron, a prison, and it wouldn’t release the air she needed.

            It came to her then, as information sometimes did, simply, like knowledge, as if she had always known, and her eyes widened and she tried to push away from the table.  He let her go, smiling, and she stumbled, backing away from him and toward the fireplace.  “It … it was you!” she cried in a trembling, high-pitched voice.  “You killed those girls!  You took out their hearts!  It was you, Gerard, it was you!”

            “Sit down, you fool,” he said.  “There’s nowhere for you to go.”

            She bolted then, made a run for the staircase, vague thoughts of locking herself in one of the upstairs bedrooms and hiding until he went away flitting through her mind, but he caught her easily, and held her as she struggled against him.  She rained down blow after blow, but her little fists held no effect.

            “Of course it was me,” Gerard said, grinning his vicious grin.  “I needed them, I needed each one, but no one was quite … right.  Now I’m beginning to think that the answer,” and his eyes traveled up and down her appraisingly, “was right in front of me all along.”

            “Let go of me, Gerard,” Leticia said through gritted teeth.

            “So you can run back to Collinwood and tell your precious Quentin?  Oh no, my dear.  I can’t – I won’t – have it.  I knew with all your talk this evening of Judah Zachery that it was only a matter of time.  And that time is now.”

 

            “You’re in his power!” she whispered. 

            “I am in no one’s power,” Gerard snarled.  “Judah Zachery is a means to an end.  As we will discover this evening, you and I.”

            “I will never help you!”

            “No need for melodrama.  You will help me.  And you know you will.”

            She did.  That was the horrible thing.  One look into his eyes and she was caught and held.  They were compelling, weren’t they, the eyes of Gerard Stiles.  And who was he, after all?  A nobody.  Until she met him in one of the dance halls in Piccadilly, he’d been Ivan Miller, a dirty street rat with a bad stutter.  But those eyes …

            And he’d promised her greatness, that he knew a place he could take her where her talents would be better put to use.  Mrs. Flora Collins, the renowned novelist, had returned to her ancestral home in Collinsport, Maine, and it was true, Leticia had never read any of the works of the esteemed Mrs. Flora Collins, nor had she heard of Collinsport, Maine, but she felt that old familiar tingle, the one that told her that something was going to happen, something important, and so she took his hand, and he took her to bed, and suddenly, as the days went by, his stutter grew less and less until it faded away altogether.

           

            He fed off me.

            Oh good god, that was true, wasn’t it.  Gerard Stiles was the name of a famous stage magician, and after his mysterious death just before they left for the states, Gerard had taken his name.  That was the first time she began to think that there was, perhaps, something the tiniest bit … well, fiendish in his grin.

            He fed off me.

            Like a vampire. 

            She wanted to sob, but there was no use.  He had some power, didn’t he, but he wanted more.  People like Gerard Stiles, nee Ivan Miller, always wanted more.

            She hated him.  Quentin, she thought desolately, oh Quentin, won’t you save me?  Or Desmond Collins, Flora’s son, handsome but distant, and he was too good for a girl like her …

            He’s going to kill me.

           

            He would have to.  She knew, as was the parlance, too much.

            “You needn’t worry, my dearest Leticia,” Gerard grinned as he sat at the table across from her.  “After this is all over, you’ll like me better, I promise you.”

 

            She looked down at the scarred surface of the table, disgusted.  She wondered how old it was, and how many other people had sat around it, or would, in the years to come.  The future.  If there was going to be any future.

            “The fingers,” Gerard told her, “must touch.”  When she didn’t react quickly enough, he seized both her wrists in his and slammed her hands onto the table with such force that she cried out.  Pain slivered up her arms and then throbbed dully.  Tears glittered in her eyes, but she bit her lip with an animal’s ferocity, determined that they would not fall. 

            Gerard closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.  His face seemed to glow with a sunken, swampy light.  “Spirits around us,” he intoned, “spirits who watch and who know:  open the way for us now.  Use our mutual power to open the doorway.  Release a spirit to speak to us.  Bring us the warlock Judah Zachery.  Bring him to us now!”

            Thunder crashed outside, so loudly that the entire ancient house shook to its foundations.  But Leticia wouldn’t cry out, wouldn’t let herself make a sound.  She was thrumming with power and she couldn’t help it.  And the power flowed from deep within her core, through her fingers, and into Gerard Stiles. 

            “Judah Zachery,” he groaned, “hear us, Judah Zachery …”

            It isn’t Judah Zachery, Leticia understood suddenly; it isn’t Judah that hears us, it isn’t Judah who will come.  This thought was tempered with some relief.

            But the door was opening, and by its light, she saw …

            … she saw …

5

Collinwood:  1968

 

            “So kind of Barnabas to grant us the usage of this house,” Professor Stokes said with his usual rounded, jolly tones.  At the moment he moved a small round table into the center of the drawing room with only the merest grunt of effort, but Carolyn took note, and frowned.  It hadn’t been too long ago that the good Professor had been a guest of the Collinsport Hospital in intensive care.  A stroke.  And it had been all her fault.

            Stokes paused and looked at her with slitted eyes.  “Dwelling on the past, Miss Stoddard?”  He chuckled.  “What have we talked about, you and I?”

            A trickle of warmth on her cheek.  She touched it and then examined the tip of her finger, startled.  She hadn’t even been aware that she was crying.  “I must maintain, mustn’t I,” she said, and smiled wryly.  There was a stab of bitterness in her voice, and she heard it, and felt ashamed. 

            “You mustn’t worry about an old man,” Stokes said.  He thumped his chest with a fist, then tapped one of his temples.  “See?  Fit as a fiddle.”

            “I know,” Carolyn said.  “I’m sorry.”

            “Nothing to be sorry about.  It’s a good sign, I think.  You’re human.”

            “That’s how I feel,” Carolyn said.  “I can tell because I’m so exhausted.”

            Stokes raised an eyebrow.

            Carolyn waved away his look with one hand that trembled like a pale moth.  “Nothing like that.  Julia’s injections …”  Her voice trailed off and she touched that trembling hand to her forehead.  Her mind always did this whenever she thought about the injections Julia had begun to give her after …

            … after …

            Stokes’ eyes narrowed.  Carolyn didn’t notice.

            After Vicki sent Danielle Roget away … and then …

            Everything was fuzzy after that.  Trying to remember the days after her dispossession was like looking into a bright, glaring light:  it hurt too much, and so it was simpler to just … look away.

            Can’t do that forever.

            No, she thought with an interior sigh, I suppose I can’t.

            “How are you feeling now?” Stokes asked softly.

            Carolyn turned her gaze back to him.  It was, he was relieved to find, heavy with steel.  Determination.  “Ready,” she said.  “To figure this out.  To find any information about the … the Enemy so we can destroy it.”

            “I am not so certain that will be possible.”

            “But we must try.”

           

            He nodded.  “Yes,” he said, and sighed.  “I suppose we must.”  He gestured to the second chair at the table.  “You will sit here.  Our fingers must touch,” he said as they sat at the same time.  With a heavy amount of sternness, he said, “Whatever happens, you must not break the circle.  Remember that.”

 

            Her eyes widened.  “What will happen if I do?”

            “My dear, it is best not to find out.”  He nodded at her, and Carolyn swallowed.  They had gone over and over the proper words, and yet, still, her mouth dried and grew cottony and her throat lined with gravel.

            This may save us all, she reminded herself sternly; this may change the future. 

            She wondered if that were truly possible.

            I have to try, she thought, and opened her mouth.

            “Spirits,” she called, “spirits around us, that watch us and that know.  Open a doorway that we may commune with those who can help us to avert a tragedy.  Help us, spirits – give us a sign that you hear us!”

            She shivered suddenly; across from her, the Professor shuddered as well.

“Spirits, you will ’ear my voice.  You will ’ear me and you will open the way.”  A woman’s voice, and so familiar, but heavy with the accent of a Cockney. 

“Professor?” Carolyn whispered.

            “I hear it too,” he said. 

            A man’s voice now, echoing to them as if from the end of a distant corridor:

“Use our mutual power to open the doorway.  Release a spirit to speak to us.  Bring us the warlock Judah Zachery.  Bring him to us now!”

            And another, a woman Carolyn swore was Julia Hoffman:

            “We seek a cure for one known as Barnabas Collins.  We seek answers to avert a tragedy!”

           

            And suddenly that feeling of opening was upon her again, that feeling that she could travel anywhere and that she could see …

            And so she opened her eyes.

            And saw.

 6

            She was looking down a distant corridor, and there were people lining it with her, women, and each one looked just like her, and Carolyn sighed to see them;

            A woman with tight ringlets and a crazed expression on her wide, china eyes, and Carolyn knew she was MILLICENT COLLINS;

            A woman with her hair long and golden, flowing down her back from a coronet style high atop her head, and this woman was LETICIA FAYE;

            A woman with her hair piled up above, yet strands escaped to form a yellow fluff, like feathers, around her face, and her cheeks were rouged and she was laughing and laughing, and this was PANSY FAYE;

            But they weren’t separate from her because they were her, in some strange, almost horrible, sublime way, each of these women grew together to form CAROLYN COLLINS STODDARD;

            and she gasped because they held hands now, and Millicent whispered, “Watch, watch, watch, and SEE …”

            “It’s going to happen,” Leticia said, and her voice was grim.  “He thinks he’s bringing it forth, but really he’s helping us, YOU, if you just know where to look …”

            “I don’t know what I’m looking for,” Carolyn said.

            “That’s easy, luv!” Pansy chuckled.  “We’re all part of the same séance …”

            “The GRAND séance,” Leticia added.

            “… and we’ve asked to open the door, and so the door has opened …”

            “And you can go through,” Millicent giggled, “because we are looking for you, we’re seeing too, you see, and so you can just go through, like this …”

            She pulled at Carolyn, and there was light all around, and Carolyn stumbled forward into the light which grew brighter and WHITER …

7

            She blinked in the overwhelmingly bright sunshine until her eyes adjusted, and then she could look around.

 

            Carolyn glanced down at herself and found that she was wearing what she had at the séance:  a bright blue dress with a cardigan of lighter blue over her shoulders.  But it was warm outside now, too warm for a sweater, and so she removed it and tied it about her waist.  The sky, she saw, was flawless, and she figured that it was probably late May, maybe even June.  She was standing in a field of waving grass, dotted here and there with yellow sprays of flowers and bluebells. 

            There was a woman sitting in the grass before her.  She looked up at Carolyn as if completely unconcerned that a strange woman in a style of dress completely alien to her own – starched, the gray of late November skies, sensible black boots, and a bonnet she had removed and set in the grass beside her – had simply appeared before her.

            “Hello,” the young woman said.

            “Hello,” Carolyn replied.

            They looked at each other.

            She was pretty, this girl, with long black hair that was tousled now and then by the breeze, redolent, Carolyn noticed, with the salt-tang of the sea.  Her eyes were great and as gray as her dress.

            “Where am I?” Carolyn asked, and her words sounded stupid in her own ears.

            “Oh, you know that,” the girl said, and waved a hand, smiling slightly.  “A better question, I suppose, would be:  when are you?”

            “We aren’t allowed,” Carolyn said childishly, “Cassandra said, we aren’t allowed to go back.”

            “Well, you haven’t,” the girl said, considering, “not really.  This is a pocket in time, I suppose you could say.  A place that doesn’t really exist anymore.”

            “You look like a Pilgrim.”

            “I am a Puritan,” the girl said primly.  She glanced down at her severe dress, tugged at her free-flowing hair.  “Or,” she added, “I was.”

            “Oh dear,” Carolyn said.  “Are you a ghost?”

            “Have you met many ghosts?”

            “I was possessed by one,” she said glumly.  “It was horrible.”

            “I’ll put your mind at ease.  I am not a ghost.”

            “Then what are you?”

            The girl shrugged and pealed merry laughter.  “Must there be a label for everything?”

            Carolyn sank into the grass beside her.  It felt real, she thought, or, she amended, as real as anything else at Collinwood.  Which wasn’t saying very much.  “I suppose not,” she said, and tugged at the grass.

            “You called for help.  I answered.  I’ve been waiting a long time for your call.”

            “I know you!” Carolyn exclaimed suddenly with delight.  “I saw you in the vision I had when Professor Stokes and I were working together!  I saw you in this place!”  She squinted her eyes.  “But you’re different now.  Your clothes …”

            “You saw me near the end,” the girl said quietly, almost sadly.  “My clothes were torn and ragged, weren’t they.”  Carolyn nodded eagerly.  “And had I spoken, I wouldn’t have sounded like this.  I told you, I’ve been waiting a long time.  For all the years to line up.  For all the séances.”

            “There’s more than one?”

            “Ayuh.”  Funny to hear this girl from a foreign century use such a Maine-specific colloquialism.  Carolyn found that she yearned to put her hand into the girl’s thick, ink-black swirl of hair as the wind nuzzled and tousled it about in long strands.  It was beautiful.  She wanted to pull it and pull it.  “In each important year, a séance is taking place now.  This moment.”

            “What are the important years?”

            “1796,” the girl said, ticking them off on one finger.  “1840.  1897. 1968.  When the forces against the Collins family have aligned.”

            “There are always forces against us.”

            The girl nodded.  “The curse,” she said knowingly.  “It’s the curse, you see.”

            “Tell me about the curse!”

            “You will learn,” the girl said.  “But we haven’t much time now.  Only enough for me to put you on your course.  Nothing is certain, you know.  Not the future, nor the present, nor the past.  There is a battle coming.  Many enemies are rising.  But there is one for you to fear more than any other.”

            “The Enemy.” 

            “The Enemy.”  She smiled wryly and touched her own fall of black hair.  Her eyes grew wide and guileless.  “Me.”

           

            Carolyn cried out; she couldn’t help herself, and she pushed herself up and away from the girl who still smiled at her so charmingly.

            “I expected you to react like that,” the girl said evenly.  “Please don’t run.  There’s nowhere for you to go.”

            “Widow’s Hill,” Carolyn said wildly.  “It’s nearby.  This is the exact spot where Collinwood will stand someday!”

            “In a hundred years,” the girl said.  “And this isn’t the exact spot.”  She gestured, and Carolyn turned to look behind her.  A barn stood behind them, built of gray, warped boards, unsound, unsteady.  The doors were barred shut, but one dark window glared at them balefully.  “It will stand there.”

 

            Carolyn shivered.  “I don’t like this place.”

            “But you like me.”

            “You’re the Enemy!”

            The girl shook her head.  “That’s too easy,” she said.  “There are sides – facets – to everything and everyone.  Remember that.  I am only a part of the Enemy.  It hasn’t really happened yet in this place, so for now I’m … just a girl.”

            Carolyn frowned.  “What hasn’t happened yet?”

            “The curse,” the girl said.  “And … the beginning.  The beginning of your family’s misery.  The beginning of the end of the world.”

            “The world …”

            “The end.  What Judah Zachery desired, and what destroyed him utterly.  He isn’t your threat.  He has been wiped out of the world.  But he left a stain … a threat …”

            “The curse.”

            “Not his curse,” the girl said, “and not mine … but intertwined.  Horribly, eternally intertwined.  His magic was so powerful that it erased him.  His magic was so powerful that it created other worlds.  The Enemy grew here, along with your family, and it waited, biding its time, collecting its power.  It needs you.  It needs your family.”

            “We know that.”

            “But you don’t know its weakness.”

            Carolyn leaned forward eagerly.  “What is it?”

            The girl’s lips pursed.  “Me,” she whispered again …

            … as a dark shadow dropped over them.

            Carolyn looked up …

           

            … the girl began to scream …

           

            And Carolyn found herself facing something out of a nightmare; enormous, with wings that stretched out to cover the world; the stifling stench of opened graves; eyes sunken deep, deep into hollow caverns, yet alive with a crimson spark that saw everything; and a gaping maw that opened wide, wide, WIDE, lined with fangs that ringed the thing’s throat and went backward and backward and backward …

            The girl fell backward too, fading as she went, and the great monstrous wings beat at the air, and Carolyn was lifted and flung –

             –  and in 1796, Millicent Collins flung herself away from the table, tears streaking her face, and though Joshua tried to embrace her, she moved away, covering her poor mad face with her hands, and she screamed, over and over, “NO no NO no Carolyn NO NO Stoddard NO …”

 

 – and Leticia Faye rose from the table and away from Gerard before he could stop her, and though he reached for her, he couldn’t quite catch her, and so she burst from the Old House and dashed down the steps and ran into the woods, and she flew like a deer and made no sound as she went, and “Carolyn,” she whispered as ran, “Carolyn, Carolyn Stoddard –”

 

 – and Quentin watched in horror as Pansy, trembling, dropped to the floor, and freshets of foam flew from her mouth, and her eyes rolled back in her head, and “Carolyn,” she cried, her feet drumming an uncontrollable tattoo against the floor, “Carolyn, Carolyn Stoddard …”

 And still Carolyn flew, backward and backward and, no, no forward, she was moving FORWARD –

8

            — shivering uncontrollably, into Eliot’s arms.  Her sweater was wrapped around her waist, and her hair was tousled and windblown, and Carolyn looked up into Eliot’s face and said, “There is no answer.  It’s too much, Eliot, it’s too powerful.  Don’t you understand?  We are doomed.  We are all doomed.”  And then looked away from his shocked, moon-white face, and buried herself against his great chest and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

TO BE CONTINUED ...