Shadows on the Wall Chapter 98

CHAPTER 98:  Those Who Endure

Voiceover by David Selby:  “Julia Hoffman has returned to the Collinwood her own time, in the year 1968, from her dreadful adventure in the future.  She has survived the experience … but for how long?  Even now the forces of a darkness greater than any the members of the Collins family and their friends have ever faced before are aligning against them … and while some will survive, there are those whose fates are already sealed.”

1

            The docks were heavy with shadows; that was the first creepy aspect of Collinsport-by-the-sea Audrey Jones noted, with a shudder and a roll of her heavily shadowed eyes.  She nearly ground the stuff into her eyelids, but it was a pretty blue, she thought, and it brought out the chocolate brown of her own eyes.  Not that anyone in this deadbeat town had noticed; the Blue Whale, a smoky hole in the wall from which she had only moments before emerged, coughing into her palm, was nearly deserted.  A limp looking bartender smoked a desultory stogie while a pretty young woman with dark black hair sipped a small sherry alone at a table near the door.  And that was it.  Audrey had flirted with the idea of seating herself at the bar, wondered for a moment if there were any other black folks in the Collinsport town limits, decided she didn’t particularly want to learn how progressive – or not – this particular backwater in Maine could be, and with that thought in mind, she skedaddled.

            And so here she was:  huddling in her fox-fur, without even a pair of gloves to warm her poor frozen hands, irritated by the unseasonable cold of the early September evening, and wondering at the darkness that seemed to possess its own peculiar weight.  The shadows, she thought, looked heavy, as if they might weigh her down.

            She was a recent graduate of Boston College and the recipient of her very own newly minted accounting degree; an aunt in Rockport, her mother’s sister, owned a small restaurant and was ready to set Audrey up as bookkeeper.  But Rockport felt dead to her, and she hadn’t really dated anybody since she dumped Tom, her on-again, off-again boyfriend for the past few years (my college boyfriend, she had told herself primly for the past three years, and so there was a part of her that had always known he was nowhere near permanent), and so she thought she might give Collinsport a try.

            Which was why a walk on the wharf after dark had seemed rather appealing, romantic in a spooky sort of way, with the fog hanging in tattered shreds over the water and wending its way around her ankles and fashionable blue pumps; but she was discovering that Collinsport was as dead as Rockport, deader perhaps.  The local watering hole deserted, the only sound the lapping of the water against the wood of the docks, the occasional cry of a night bird. 

            “Christ,” she said aloud, suddenly disgusted with herself and with this entire pisshole town.  The loneliness she felt since that last night with Tom, allowing him to kiss her, to put his hand on her breast, one more time, he promised her, cooing into her hungry mouth, just one more time; that idiotic loneliness rose up to crush her, and she felt a sob beginning to bloom rottenly in her chest.

            “Here, here,” a man’s voice said behind her, and she straightened up, suddenly terrified.  It was a gentle voice, heavy with amusement, and she spun to face him, whoever he was.  One hand went immediately to her purse.  She kept a small knife there, nothing more than a paring knife really, something you might use to peel potatoes, but she’d carried it ever since she had been approached by mouthy boys on a salty summer evening a year or so ago after she insisted that Tom allow her to walk back to her apartment by herself.  Mouthy boys who called her all sorts of unpleasant names, names she refused to think about.  But now she had the knife, and she would never – never – allow anyone to threaten her like those boys had again.

            The man before her was handsome, with thick lips split into a toothy white smile, and curling hair that twined heavily on his head and wound in coils around his ears.  “Here here,” he said again.  “That’s no way for a nice girl like you to talk.  Not on a night like this.”

            “Helluva night,” she said, smiling a big smile, feeling spite rise up in her, replacing the fright, swimming on a tide of adrenaline.  “Helluva foggy night.”

            “Indeed,” the man said.  “You’ve never been to Collinsport before, I gather.”

            “Oh, all the time,” she said airily.  “I practically live here, you know.”

            “I’ve never seen you before.”

            Her smile became acid.  “I expect that you’d recognize me.  I stand out, it seems.”

            “I always look out for pretty girls.”

            “Flattery.”

            “Not at all.”  The idea! 

            She lifted her chin and smiled her best, her most coquettish smile.  “Perhaps,” she drawled, “perhaps you’d care to escort a lady back to her hotel.”

            “You’re staying at the Inn?”

            “Of course.”

            “Am I the only friend you’ve met tonight?”

            “Oh, I have tons of friends.  A million friends.”  Her lower lip trembled, mock pouting.  “But I’m lonely.”  She stuck out her hand.  “I’m Audrey.”

            The man, to her immense surprise, grasped it between both his hands gently, oh so gently, bowed, and raised it to his lips.  They were icy cold, and she shivered involuntarily.  “A beautiful name.  And an unusual one.”

            “Not so unusual.”

            “I’ve lived in Collinsport a long, long time.  I’ve never met an Audrey.”

            “I,” she smiled, “could be your first.”

            “My first,” the man said musingly, “my first.  Yes, I suppose you could be, at that.”

            She shivered again.  No real reason; he wasn’t supremely creepy, not like those damned shadows that hung heavy over everything in this town.  But a finger of disquiet touched her heart, and she couldn’t explain it. 

            Run, Audrey.  Don’t say another word, never mind polite goodbyes.  Just run.

            She thought of Tom.  She thought of her loneliness.  She thought of the knife in her purse.

            He offered her an arm.  “Please,” he said.

            She bit her lower lip.

            She took his arm.  “Thank you, sir,” she smiled.  They began to walk.  Her heels made loud clicking sounds against the wood of the wharf.  He moved silently, absolutely soundlessly, like a great cat in the gloom.  She shivered again.

            “Cold?” he said.  “My coat.”  And slid out of it seamlessly.  He held it out to her.

            She barely hesitated.  “Thank you,” she said, shrugging it on.  “Chivalry isn’t dead, it seems.  You’re a knight.  A knight in the night.  What’s your name, Sir Night Knight?”

            The man’s thick lips split into that smile again.  “You’re funny,” he said, and touched her cheek.  She shivered again.  His eyes captured her.  “My name is Gerard,” the man said.  His teeth were very white, and very straight.  He took Audrey’s hand and squeezed it tight, tight, tight within his own.  And then, “Stiles,” he added.

 

2

            “You need to rest.”

            Julia’s eyes narrowed over the cup of Oolong Mrs. Johnson, suddenly allowed the run of her kitchen again, had thrust into Julia’s hands a few minutes ago before disappearing back into the kitchen’s depths.  “Expect it’ll be overrun with mice,” she had said darkly, and wagged a finger in Julia’s face, “you mark my words.”  Now Julia said, “I don’t want to rest.”

            The woman sitting in the chair across from her sighed heavily.  “You haven’t slept in days.”  She thought for a moment.  “Exactly how many days did you spend in the future?”

            “Not even one.”

            “Still.”  Angelique – or Cassandra; the witch had been very careful to mention right away, after the room shifted and burped and Julia Hoffman appeared, very much alive, at their summons, that her name was Cassandra – seemed genuinely concerned.  Julia supposed she was.  After all, she didn’t know all the fun facts about the future Julia did.

            She is Cassandra again.  That’s the start of it.

            And it had to be stopped.

            Because she was Cassandra in the future as well.

            “Change back,” Julia said suddenly, sharply. 

           

            The blue eyes across from her widened.  “Change back?  Into what?”

            “You can’t be Cassandra anymore.”  Panic rose inside her suddenly like a great black bird spreading dark wings.

            Cassandra laughed her irritating laughter.  “Why ever not?”

            “Why do you have to question everything I say?” Julia snapped, sitting up in her bed and baring her teeth.  “Why can’t you just listen to me?”

            “You’ve been under a great strain,” Cassandra said, as soothingly as she could through gritted teeth, resisting as much as she could the idea of turning the good doctor into a doormat or a rutabaga.  As tempting a proposition as that was. 

            “You know,” Julia said accusingly.  “You saw!  You were there, if only for a moment.  But you saw –”

           

            “I saw myself,” Cassandra agreed, nodding.  Julia’s mouth closed with a snap.  “I know.  I will exist in 2014 as I am now.”

            “Calling yourself Cassandra.”

            “Bitterness does not become you,” Cassandra purred.  “But yes.  I will call myself Cassandra.  It was … necessary when we encountered Elizabeth unexpectedly outside the house.  I have to confess, Julia, it is rather liberating to have this guise, another identity I can turn to if …”  Her voice trailed off.

            “You mustn’t!” Julia’s voice cracked.  “Why won’t you understand?  If we can undo even one piece of what I saw in the future, perhaps we can undo it all.  Pull one thread, and the entire cursed garment falls into nothing.”

            “A beautiful metaphor,” Cassandra sniffed, “but hardly necessary.  Julia, you saw it all.  You returned to this time alive.  And you reported what you saw.  Already the future has been changed.  We will be on the lookout for this … this Enemy, as you call it.”  Her brow furrowed.  “Although, it may very well be that we have already encountered it … in form or another.”

            “What do you mean?”

            Cassandra shook her thick raven tresses.  “Never mind,” she said with the sweet edge in her voice that never failed to grate on Julia’s nerves.  “What matters is that you returned, and you returned with knowledge.  We can fight now.  And we can make different choices.  I will make a concerted effort to fight the Enemy if it comes calling with promises to make Barnabas love me in exchange for your life.”  Her lips trembled on the edge of a smile.  “As tempting a scenario as that might be …”  Julia’s mouth opened; her eyes flashed; Cassandra waved a hand and tittered.  “I’m only joking, dear Julia.  One must always keep one’s sense of humor at a time of crisis.”

            Julia crossed her arms and settled back grumpily against her pillows.  “It is a time of crisis,” she muttered in her best sulky tone.

            Cassandra took her hand and squeezed it.  Surprised, Julia gazed into the other woman’s eyes and found … sincerity there.  And compassion.  She felt like gaping.  Would wonders never cease.  “We’ll do our best,” Cassandra said.  “To fight.  To endure.  That’s what we do.  What we’ve always done.”

            Flustered, Julia could only think to say, “You mustn’t lose your powers.”

            Cassandra tossed her head and uttered an evil chuckle.  “Oh my dear, I have no intention of losing my powers.  Not even a little.  Don’t worry your pretty red head about that.”  She released the doctor’s hand and, suddenly all business, rose to her full height.  She was, Julia admitted grudgingly, particularly lovely this evening, clad as she was in an electric blue skirt with a matching blazer.  She had tied her dark hair back behind her head, revealing to their best advantage her amazing cheekbones and crystalline eyes.  Damn her, Julia thought; one look at her, and Barnabas will …

            …Barnabas will what?

            He couldn’t possibly love Angelique.  Not now.  Not after … after everything she had done. 

            Could he?

            Perhaps, a traitor voice whispered in her ear, perhaps it isn’t who Barnabas loves that you should be worried about.

            “I loved Barnabas once,” Cassandra said gently, framed for a moment in the doorway.  Her voice grew harder, firmer.  “But that time is over and done.  Please believe me, Julia.  Whatever you saw in the future – whatever terrible things I did – I will work harder than I ever have to avoid them.  I promise you that.”

            And she was gone.

            Julia snuggled into her pillows and closed her eyes.  She was exhausted.  She longed for a cigarette.

            She was asleep mere seconds later, and so she didn’t see the air shimmer before her bed, shimmer with something like great heat, or the eyes that appeared and hung before her, disembodied, watching her with a blackness in them greater than hate.

3

            The heat was oppressive, but he endured it.  After all, he thought, bemused, hadn’t Quentin Collins become the king of endurance?  Living through times of despair, watching those he loved die time and again, knowing with agonizing certainty that he was sometimes responsible for their deaths?  So he would endure the heat in this noxious little cabin with no windows, with an iron door, with a single table and a single chair, and why was it so hot in the mountains of Montana anyway?  Summer was but a passing fancy at this elevation; evenings he slept under the stars with only his sleeping bag and nearly-flattened pillow beneath his head, Quentin was certain he would awaken sheathed with a rime of frost, but no.  There was only this heat.  This damnable heat.

            The cabin was not easy to locate.  Unsurprising; in a similar position, Quentin would have hidden himself away with equal intensity.  Actually, as he had told Eliot Stokes in the early days of their friendship, he had behaved similarly.  But instead of running across the country, Quentin had fled high into the Urals, initially questing for a warlock with knowledge to end the curse, then, finally, the realization that he just wanted to be alone.  Finally, dreadfully alone.

            Quentin closed his eyes now and remembered that night when, bathed by the full light of that goddamned silvery moon, he stood at the edge of a precipice and spread his arms, as if he were some great bird.  So easy to do it, he thought at the time; so easy to just … go.  To let go.  To let go and fall into that unknown gulf.

            End it.  End it for all time.

            Only the sudden doubt that it would really and truly end held him back from the oblivion he sought.  What if the portrait’s influence stretched this far, reached out with Petofi’s monstrous power and kept him alive, even if his body became shattered and destroyed by the rocks that Quentin knew must wait for him at the bottom of the gorge?  What if he lay there, alive in his ruined body, impossibly far from anyone who would hear his cries or be able to help him, as-good-as-dead in a body that refused to finally die and allow him the peace he craved so much?

            And so he took a step back from the precipice.

            He never found the warlock.  That was in 1919; he returned, instead, to America, where he joined the war effort (the Great War, they called it, as if it were the last, could ever possibly be the last; so ridiculous, so laughable), and returned for the briefest of moments to peer in at his relations at Collinwood.  Edward was dead by then, and Jamison ruled the familial home with the iron fist Quentin always feared he would wield.  Of Nora there was no sign.  Elizabeth, Jamison’s pride and joy, was a toddler, barely two.  Jamison’s wife was a great beauty, as Quentin might have expected.  She was also, it seemed, miserably unhappy.

            “La, Quentin,” Magda had grinned at him, her spirit shimmering into view as he stood with his hands cupped to the glass, peering into the drawing room, “you’re too much of a gentleman to become a peeping tom now.  Let them be.  Let them all be.”

            When he turned to face her, she was already gone.  A victim of Petofi, but really his victim.  Dead, like all the others in that terrible year of 1897.  Dead because of him.  And here he was, because he was Quentin Collins, and he endured.

            He shook way those memories now, and in good time too, it seemed.

            The door to the cabin was opening.

            Quentin stood quickly, suddenly and unaccountably nervous.  He had no business coming here, and he knew it.

            I had all the business in the world.  He is my great-grandson.  I love him. 

            Christopher Jennings’ face bore no real expression of surprise as he stood, framed in the doorway to the cabin.  Only a terrible emptiness.

            “Get out,” he said.

            “Is that any way to greet your granddad?” Quentin said, trying as hard as he could to make his voice boom, to manufacture good humor. 

            Chris didn’t move.  “I don’t want to see you.  I don’t want to see any of you.  Not ever again.”

            Quentin felt a spear of real anger pierce him.  “Well,” he drawled, “turns out I don’t care what you want.”  Chris raised an eyebrow; surprise, Quentin thought, relieved, surprise is an emotion, or close enough.  He isn’t so dead inside after all.  “Listen.  I had to find you.  I came a long way.  You weren’t,” he said with a rueful shake of his head, “easy to find.”

            “That was the point.”

           

            “You made it, then.”  Quentin had thought long and hard about the possible speeches he might make once he finally found Chris, the impassioned pleas he might make, the words he would cobble together, rhetoric, obfuscation.  Screw it, he thought, screw it all, and he said instead, simply, “Come back with me.”

            “No,” Chris said instantly.

            “I want you to.”

            “Turns out,” Chris said, echoing exactly Quentin’s wry tone, “I don’t care what you want.”

            “Don’t be smart.”

            “If I were smart I would have killed myself.  I would have shot myself with a silver bullet that last night, when I turned into a million kinds of monster instead of just one and nearly ate Julia Hoffman’s face.”  He was trembling now, his hands clenched into fists, and his face was deadly pale. 

           

            Quentin forced himself to retain his patience.  “Julia explained that all to me.  She wants to help you, Christopher.  She’s been working on a cure –”

            “Excellent!” Chris roared, whirled, threw his hands above his head, and too late, Quentin, wincing, realized that he had employed the wrong tactic.  “Fantastic!  So she can make me even more of a monster than I was before?  Do you think I’m stupid?  Does she?”

            “No one thinks you’re –”

            “I never changed like that before.”  Chris’ eyes were blazing, and Quentin saw that they had begun to change, to lighten subtly, gradually, from dark brown to a light green.  He was becoming the animal now, under the sun, the moon hours from rising.  “It was because of her, because of her experiments.”  He spat the word.  Then his face twisted; his mouth screwed up and his eyes grew even lighter.  “And Joe is dead because of me. Or Nathan, or whoever he was.  I killed him, Quentin.  I ate him.”

            “I know what you’re going through.  Don’t you remember?  I went through it all too.”

            “Spare me.”  Chris held up one hand.  Quentin, fascinated, saw that the index and middle finger were exactly the same length.  That was a new and, as they all seemed to be these days, disturbing development.  “This is my life now.  There are no people, no one to bother me, no one for me to kill.  I don’t need to go into any town because I change every night, and that’s what you’re not understanding, I can see it in your face.  I change every night, and every night I kill.”  He grinned, and his teeth were very long.  His face was beginning to ripple and change, and the timbre of his voice dropped through several registers of sound.  “Every night,” he said, through a mouthful of fangs, “every night,” and he took a step forward, as, dismayed, Quentin took a compensatory step backward, “every night I kill.”

4

            The cigarette she lit did not jitter in her fingers; when Alexandra March inhaled, she dragged the strength of the cigarette and its smoke into her lungs, felt its soothing strength, its dragon claws inside her lungs; then she exhaled.  She even allowed herself a tiny smile.

            She stood beside the statue of Diana in the garden of Collinwood, watching as the sun sank behind the hills.  The dusky light was blue here, and cast everything into a blue study as well.  It matched her mood.  She didn’t want to be here; she didn’t want to interact with these people.

            People.  That was a laugh.  Exactly how many humans had she met tonight? 

            Some of them would die.  She would be responsible for a number of their deaths.  And she hated the thought of it.

            “You needn’t brood, my dear,” a man’s voice said.  Alex stiffened, but it wasn’t a surprise.  She exhaled blue smoke and turned to face him.

            “You shouldn’t let them see you,” she said.

            The little man in the bowler hat and rounded, upturned nose bowed a little.  “Not even a ‘Hello, dearest uncle, how are you?’” he said, then pealed merry laughter.  “My dear, how you disappoint me.”

            “That’s worse than anything,” she remarked.  “Worse than making you angry.  To disappoint you.  That really gets me.”

            “Then you may sleep well.  I’m not at all disappointed in you.  I’m rather pleased, actually, with your progress.  You’ve already met them all, then.”

            “I have.”

            “And you’ve been inside the house.”

            Her smile twisted.  “Mrs. Stoddard has invited me to stay.”

            The little man’s eyebrows rose to near-impossible heights.  “Marvelous!” he said, and clapped his hands together.  “My dear, what a wonder you are.”

            “Not at all.  She’s lonely.  Someone very near to her just died.”  She exhaled another stream of blue smoke.  “As you know.”

            “Yes,” the man admitted.  “It’s true.  I did know.”

            “You should have told me.”

            “That the Collins governess died?”

           

            “That she looked exactly like me,” Alex said, trembling.  She ground the cigarette onto the flagstones beneath her heel, then stood up, looking at him with flashing eyes.  “You should have told me.  Who is she, this girl?  Or was.  Who was she?”

            “A mystery woman,” he said, his voice gentle.  “It was better for you never to have met her.”

            Darkly, she said, “You should let me decide that for myself.  You always have before.”

            “This woman requires that exceptions be made.”

            “Why?  What did she do?”

            “You’ll know all in good time, dearest Alexandra, I promise you that.”  The little man took both her hands in his.  When he spoke, his voice was hard.  “But I suggest you control yourself before we speak any further.  You are not in control at this moment, and you know how it vexes me when you lose yourself like this.”

            Alex pulled away from him, and put both her hands against her face.  Her fingertips grazed her eyes, which, she realized, belatedly, had darkened into a charred obsidian.  A sob grew and died in her throat as she squeezed her eyes shut.

            The little man watched her patiently.  He had seen this before. 

            At last she opened them, and they were as they had been before:  a chocolate brown, wide, the eyes of an ingénue.

            Only Alexandra March was no ingénue.  They both knew it.

            “I’m sorry,” she whispered.  A tear trembled in the corner of one eye and ran down her cheek.

            He stopped it with one finger.  The tear balanced there, crystalline, holding the dancing lights of Collinwood within its depths.  He placed his finger into his mouth, and allowed the tear to burn there against his tongue.  “Don’t be sorry, dearest,” he said, brushing his fingers against her soft, dark fall of hair.  “You are, as I said, a marvel.  You will do your job, as I have instructed you, and all will be revealed to you.  I promise you, Alexandra.  But for now …” and his eyes darted to the windows that looked in on the drawing room.  Inside, Elizabeth and Carolyn sat across from Professor Stokes and sipped at the tea Mrs. Johnson had prepared.

            Alex followed his gaze.  She watched them as he watched them.  After a moment she nodded.  “Yes,” she said, and moved toward the drawing room.  She turned back only once, but he was gone, as she knew he would be.  “Yes,” she said again, and returned to the drawing room, warmed by Elizabeth’s exclamations of delight.

5

            Gerard snarled; the wound from the tiny pen-knife Audrey stuck into his hand bubbled and spurted smoke.  Audrey herself, eyes wide, teeth clamped together, backed away from her attacker.  “Son of a bitch,” she said.  His eyes fixed on her and widened and then glowed, hot, like twin furnaces, and she took a shuddering step backward.  They stood outside the Collinsport Inn, still in the street, and the fog curled and coiled, feline-like, around their ankles. 

           

            The attack had come suddenly, without warning; one moment they walked together down the deserted streets of the tiny town, Audrey chattering, Gerard seemingly enjoying her chatter with companionable silence, and suddenly she felt his fingers clamp down on her arm.  They dug into the flesh like the claws of a vulture, and when she tried to pull away, he spun her around so she could see his face and the giant grin plastered across it.

           

            A grin that was too giant, as it turned out.

            His mouth stretched as she watched, horrified, pulling like taffy, and it became a gaping hole studded with too many teeth colored a sickly yellow; his eyes began to glow a sulfurous orange, and though Audrey screamed, no one appeared in any windows, no one slammed open a door, and she thought, crazily to herself, You wondered, didn’t you, you wondered how progressive Collinsport is, and here’s your answer, you stupid girl, you stupid, stupid –

            Then she remembered the knife.

            Gerard didn’t speak; he merely continued to snarl.  He reached with fingers grown monstrously long and plucked the knife from his hand and threw it to the sidewalk, where it clattered and disappeared into the fog.

            His grin reappeared.  And grew.

            She wanted to ask him a number of questions before she died – because the possibility that she would not survive this encounter with … whatever he was occurred to her – but did she really want to know?  What he was?  What he planned to do with her?

            She thought not.

           

            She turned instead.  To run.

            Until one of those dreadful monster hands clamped onto her shoulder and pulled her back.

            Into the fog.

            And closer to him.

 TO BE CONTINUED ...