Shadows on the Wall Chapter 114

CHAPTER 114:  Apocalypse Season

 by Nicky

Voiceover by Thayer David:  “The end is approaching … the end of days, and nights, and  people, and stories.  For the Enemy continues to gather its forces, while at the same time Angelique and Laura Collins have joined forces for the same nefarious purpose:  to end all life as we know it.” 

1

            “No one knows I have this,” Audrey said, and held the curving blade up to the light that glowed warmly, benignly, from the lamp beside the little table Sam Evans crafted when Maggie was seven and he was experimenting with woodwork.  Outside the Evans cottage, both women could hear the ever-present crashing of the sea, and they paused, listening to it, out there in the dark.

 

            Finally, Maggie said, “You know, I’m becoming just the teeniest bit tired of everyone coming to me when they have a problem.  Unless that problem can be solved with a cup of coffee and a slice of apple pie.  Then I’m your girl.  But this magic junk?  Can’t you guys understand that I’m trying to wean myself off of it?”

            “I do understand,” Audrey said patiently – well, patiently for her – and tried to smile.  “But you have to understand, Miss Evans –”  She paused, clearly waiting for Maggie to assure that, no, it was quite all right to call her by her first name.

            Maggie’s smile was wide and warm.  “You can call me Miss Evans,” she said.

            Audrey frowned.  “You have to understand, Miss Evans.  I’m new to this supernatural jazz too.  Before a few months ago, I had no idea there were such things as vampires, werewolves, and witches, much less that they all boogied down in the same town.”

            “Collinsport is a fun place,”  Maggie said, simpering.  She held out her hand.  “May I?”

            Audrey hesitated.

            “Since you came all this way,” Maggie sighed, “and since clearly I am going to help you, you might as well at least pretend to trust me.  Or begin to.”

            Audrey bit her lower lip, then reached over and handed the Dagger of Erishkegal to the witch.

            She looked at it for a long time.  “It hums,” she murmured.  Audrey raised an eyebrow.  Maggie smiled.  “With magic.  It’s powerful.”

            “I know that,” Audrey said.  “I’ve seen the damned thing in action.”

            “I’ve never heard of this particular goddess before,” Maggie said.  Her eyes were closed now.  Little black sparks had begun to jump and circle and collide around her fingertips.  Audrey watched them nervously.  “There were so many areas of the magical world Nicholas never got around to explaining to me.”

            “Nicholas?”

            Maggie cracked one eye.  “My former lover,” she said.  “A warlock.”  Simply.  “He’s dead now.”

            She killed him, Audrey thought, but wisely held her tongue.

           

            Maggie handed her back the dagger, then leaned back against the sofa and the hideous motley afghan that hung over it, and sipped her coffee delicately.  “This is the third time in as many months that I’ve had visitors begging me for my magical help.  I’m beginning to feel like I’m only here to offer exposition.  Or to be a deus ex machine.  That’s not in the cards for me, sweetmeat.”

            Audrey blinked.  “I don’t know what that means,” she said.

            “It means,” Maggie said, “that it’s about time I got something out of this deal.”

            “What do you want?” Audrey said, and shifted uncomfortably against the scratchy fabric of the threadbare recliner Maggie had offered her.

            “I don’t know yet,” Maggie said, and pursed her lips.  “Oh wait.  Yes I do.”  Her eyes flooded with sudden black; Audrey leaped up from her chair, but Maggie wasn’t focused on her at all.  She seized the dagger back, then rent the air beside her with it and commanded, “Cultrum, sectis!”

 

            Audrey gasped.

            Maggie still sat on the couch.

            Entirely by herself.

            “Damn it,” she said at last.  Her eyes had returned to their regular fawn-brown coloring.  She threw the dagger onto the coffee table with a snarl of disgust.  “I suppose it only had one really good go in it.”

            “What were you trying to do?” Audrey said furiously.  “You don’t know what that thing can do!  You haven’t seen it!  It could have killed you!”

            Maggie shrugged, and sipped calmly again at her coffee.  “I suppose it could have,” she said reflectively.  “But it didn’t.”  Then, lowly, quietly:  “Wouldn’t have been a great loss anyway.”

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

            “You don’t know me,” Maggie said in that low, flat voice.  “That’s probably a good thing.  I’m a terrible person, it turns out, or, at the very least, an uninteresting one.”

            Audrey laughed.  “You’re a witch.  That’s about as far from uninteresting as you can –”

            “Oh sure,” Maggie said.  “Just another witch, here in the fabulous fishing town of Collinsport, ME.  Right next to Angelique and Edith and Nicholas and Petofi and any other sucker dumb enough to practice this horseshit.”

            “Why does that make you a bad person?”

            Maggie shook her head and glared into her coffee cup.  “I killed my father, for starters,” she said.  “I didn’t have to.  And I can blame the magic, but that’s too easy.  I wanted to.  Had for a long time, I guess. And maybe that makes me a psychopath and not a bad person.  Hell, you say potato, I say crazy person.”

            “I don’t think you’re crazy.”

            “What do you know?” Maggie said with sudden fury.  “Pardon the pun, but you got sucked into this garbage in the third act.  You have no idea what it means to live in this town all your life but to never feel … to never really know what it’s like to …”  Suddenly she put her hands in front of her face.

            Audrey, unsure, watched her for a long moment before she finally knelt down beside her.  “There, there,” she said, and patted her on the head.

            “Oh, leave me alone!” Maggie screamed.  “God, why can’t you all just leave me alone?”

            Audrey said nothing.

 

            Maggie looked at her, her eyelids streaked with black chunks of mascara.  “There’s an apocalypse coming, isn’t that what you all think?”

            “I guess you could call it that.”

            “And the world is supposed to end.”

            “All of ‘em, according to Angelique.”

            “Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,” Maggie said snuffily.  She waved her hand and a handkerchief materialized.

            “Neat trick,” Audrey said as the other woman blew her nose.

            “Comes in handy sometimes, I’ll admit it,” Maggie said.  “No, I’m wrong.  I don’t want the world to end.  That’s why I’m helping you.  Why I’ve helped the others.  But I was hoping …”  She sniffled.  “I was hoping that the Dagger would separate me from my magic.  Just like it did for Angelique.”

            “Maybe,” Audrey said, “maybe Angelique is different from you.”

            “Or maybe the Dagger works differently,” Maggie said thoughtfully.  “I hadn’t thought of that.  It may require … fuel.”

            “What kind of fuel?”  Audrey was rapidly growing tired of anything related to magic.  Suspicion sharpened her tone.

            “Some mystical objects,” Maggie said carefully, “particularly those of the darker magical persuasion, need a catalyst to cause them to work.  The darker the object, the darker or more dangerous the catalyst.”

            “What kinds of catalysts?”  Audrey was now bored beyond belief.  She examined her fingernails and wondered if, by sharpening them, she might more effectively slash a throat.  How did one go about slashing a throat?  She wasn’t certain.  But she thought she’d like to try.

            “Blood is the most common, and it must usually be human to cause the spell to work properly.  Sometimes the object requires a death.  With a … a thing like this, and since it belongs to a goddess of death, I’m willing to bet the person casting the spell would need to kill someone.  With the dagger.”

            Audrey was suddenly all ears.  “You don’t say,” she purred, and picked the knife up again.

            “Anyone you have in mind?” And Maggie’s smile showed all her white, white teeth.

2

 

            “Baby,” Sebastian said, and kissed Chris’ forehead, “it isn’t the end of the world.”  They were snuggled together in the bed in Chris’ cottage, and the fire crackled merrily out in the living room.  But they were warm enough in the cozy little bedroom, even with the winter wind whooping it up outside.  There would be a storm, Sebastian had predicted, later on, a Nor’easter, a real bitch.  “Sometimes,” he had said, “our worlds aren’t so different.”

            “But that’s what I’m afraid of,” Chris said now, glumly.  “That that’s exactly what it is.  The end.  Of everything.”

            “I didn’t hurt him.  He didn’t hurt me.  He didn’t hurt you.”

            “But he wanted to.  He would’ve tried to.  And you …”  Chris looked away, niggling his lower lip with his teeth.  “You shouldn’t have done that,” he whispered. 

            Sebastian’s smile was roguish.  “Done what?”

            “You know.”

            “Don’t hide like that.  Get your head out from under the covers.  Threatened him, you mean?”

            “You wouldn’t have really …”  His voice trailed off, and he peered at his lover above the covers with eyes that were still flecked with emerald shards amidst the brown. 

            “Torn off his head?  Strewn his limbs from here to Collinsport?”  Sebastian shrugged.  “Probably not.”

            “Probably.”

            “Christopher, come on.”  Sebastian nuzzled his neck, nipped delicately at his earlobe.  Chris shivered.  His toes curled, and he pressed his icy feet against Sebastian’s, which were blazing.  “You know what it’s like to be the Animal.  You’re beginning to gain control.  You’re beginning to find strength in its power.  I’ve never lived with the wolf the way you have:  the blackouts, the murders.  I have never killed.  Your feet,” he added, “are freezing, by the by.”

            “But you wanted to.  With J –”  He took a breath.  “With Nathan.  And I’m sorry.  But they’re getting warmer.”

            “To kill.  To protect you?  To save your life?”  His face darkened; his eyes flashed in the dimness of the room.  “I might.”

 

            “I feel bad for him,” Chris whispered.

            “Yeah,” Sebastian said unexpectedly, and Chris peered at him, owl-eyed, “so do I.”

            “You do?  Why?”  He sat up on one elbow.

            Sebastian stared at the ceiling.  “Because I think he really does love you.  And that eats at him.  From what you’ve told me, and from what I know about the man just by meeting him, I have managed to surmise that Nathan Forbes is an egocentric, self-obsessed, not particularly imaginative sonofabitch.  He’s also a liar.”

            “Yeah,” Chris said sadly.  “He is.”

            “But there is one thing he hasn’t lied about:  and that’s his feelings about you.”

            Small:  “They scare me.”

            “They should, baby.  He almost turned himself into a vampire to get you to love him.  That scares me too.”  He touched Chris’ hair, marveled at how fine it felt, how soft it was.  “Losing you.  That thought.”

            Now he smiled, warm and genuine.  His eyelids were fluttering.  “You aren’t going to.”

            “Be careful when you say things like that in this town, near that house.  We’re never far away from the edge; you know that.  From losing everything; from losing it all.”

            “Do you ever wish,” Chris said sleepily, “that I was him?”

            Sebastian froze.  His fingers stopped their dance in his hair.  Chris didn’t notice.  “Him?”

            “Him,” Chris said.  His eyes were closed.  He was near to dozing, almost asleep.  “The other Chris Jennings.”

 

            “Collins,” Sebastian whispered.  “His name was Christopher Collins.”  But Chris was sleeping; his eyelashes fluttered, and his chest rose, his breath a gentle susurration, slow, slow, slow, and deep.  Sebastian watched him.  Outside the wind screamed and cackled like a wicked witch in a fairy tale, and Sebastian, not sleeping, watched on throughout the night.

3

            “Barnabas, thank god!”  Elizabeth threw open the doors of Collinwood to admit her cousin, whose arms were occupied with the unconscious body of David Collins, head lolling, mouth agape, eyes still closed. 

            “Help me with the drawing room doors, Elizabeth,” Barnabas commanded.  She did as she was bade, and, hands clasping and warring with each other, followed them into the drawing room.  The windows outside were choked with the skeins of snow that swirled relentlessly out there in the blackness, and she cast an uneasy glance in their direction before she knelt at her nephew’s side.

            “Is he all right?” she whimpered.  She brushed a knuckle against David’s cheek, then drew it back hastily.  “Oh Barnabas, I was so scared –”

 

            “He is alive,” Barnabas said grimly.  “But for how much longer, no one may say.”

            “Barnabas!” Elizabeth gasped, and pressed her hands to her cheeks.  “Your eye!  What’s happened to your eye!”

            Barnabas bowed his head with a sigh of deep weariness.  “It is a long story, dear cousin,” he said.

            “But you’ll tell me,” she said, with such firmness that Barnabas, surprised, lifted his head to gaze at her in amazement.  “You must tell me!  We have kept too many secrets in this house for far too long, Barnabas.  That ends now, this night.”

            “I don’t know what you mean,” he said weakly.

            “You can’t hide things from me any longer,” she said.  “I know too much.  I know … what you are.”

            His good eye grew wide.  “Elizabeth!”

            “You needn’t deny it any longer.”  Her cheeks were high with color; her breath came in little pants; and he could hear her heart thrumming away in her chest like an excited bird.  “I know that you are Barnabas Collins … the only Barnabas Collins, and that you died in 1796, and that you live on, somehow … as one of the living dead.”

            … as one of the living dead …

            Barnabas moaned.  It was too much – too similar to the words his mother had uttered before she died in his arms, the poison she consumed performing its job all too well as it burned away her insides.  “You know,” he whispered.

            She lifted her head even higher, impossibly.  “And I don’t care.”

            He looked at her.  He gaped; he was unable to stop gaping.

           

            “You are a Collins,” she said firmly, proudly.  “And you saved us.  I know that.  Something terrible happened to us all and you went back in time and you stopped it.  I don’t know how, and I don’t know what it was, not exactly, but I know that you love us enough to risk your own life, and that means the world to me, Barnabas.  Even if you are a … a …”

 

            “A vampire,” he said softly.  “You may say the word, dearest Elizabeth.”

            “A victim of a curse,” she said firmly.  “You fought it and you triumphed.”

            “I have not triumphed,” he said sadly.

            “And yet you continue to try.  Barnabas, don’t you see?  An apocalypse is an ending.  It destroys the old and out of the ashes of that old something new arises.  In the wild there are forest fires, and they annihilate what stands in their path, and after the rains fall and the fire is extinguished there is new life and new growth, and that’s the cycle of life.  It’s natural, Barnabas.  Our old lives are dead.  They’re gone and they aren’t coming back.”  Her eyes were shining.  She put a hand on his shoulder, and he surprised himself by covering her hand with his own.  She did not shy away from its cold and clamminess.  “But we are still here.  We endure.  And we will always endure.  Not every apocalypse is something bad, Barnabas.”

            He held her hand for a moment longer, then brushed it with his icy lips.  “You are an amazing woman, Elizabeth,” he said.

            “Not really,” she replied.  “If anything, I am only now discovering who I really am.  How strong I can be.  I tried to save my sister from something dark and terrible a long time ago, just as I tried to save her daughter.  Both times I failed and I let the darkness consume them.  I will not fail this time, I swear it.”

            They looked at each other as the fire crackled in the hearth and the wind screamed outside, and there was real understanding there between them for the first time; Barnabas opened his mouth, not completely certain of what he was about to say, and suddenly David stirred, and cried out, and they were at his side in an instant.

 

            “The fire,” David moaned, “the flames – it comes!  It comes!”

            “David!” Elizabeth cried.

            “David,” Barnabas said, and touched his face gently, “David, are you awake?  Can you hear our voices?”

            “Mother, mother,” David whimpered.  “She’s gone!  Mother, where are you?”

            “He’s burning up,” Barnabas said.

           

            Elizabeth strode toward the phone.  “I’ll call Dr. Reeves,” she said.

            “He won’t do any good.”

            “Then Julia –”

            “Julia sent me here with him,” Barnabas said miserably.  “I’m afraid that we are unable to rely on medical science for an explanation.”

            “Laura,” Elizabeth said darkly.  “Barnabas, she was here, only an hour or so ago.  I thought …”  She hesitated, unsure of how to proceed.  “I thought we had come to some kind of understanding.  I went to make us some tea and when I came back she was gone.  I have no idea where she is now.”

            “Gone,” David, thrashing, gasped, “gone, gone, gone!”

            “This malady is supernatural,” Barnabas said. 

            “Then,” Elizabeth said with a tight little smile, “we require supernatural assistance.

            “We will hold a séance.”

4

             The shadows clustered thickly in the great hall of the monastery at St. Eustace’s Island.  Roxanne, who ordinarily felt supremely comfortable amidst the shadows, suddenly found herself loathing them.  In her human life she had longed to travel to London, Paris, Milan, cities of light and adventure and excitement; it wasn’t until Gerard Stiles transformed her into the loathsome night-thing she had become that she was able to shed her old skin and finally break free of Collinsport, and only then had she dared to visit all those places she had only thought to dream of before.  But even then she dwelt in the shadows, still afraid of the sun.

            She missed it suddenly, unexpectedly. 

            “It was unwise to return to this place,” she said.  Neither she nor her companion had spoken after their initial, grumbled greeting of each other.

            “I disagree,” Petofi said.  “There is a power here.  The Light dwelt here once, or its champions, but they abandoned this stronghold so that the Dark could take its proper place.”  His grin revealed strong, square teeth.  He was wholly restored now; the power inherent in his Hand finished what her own spells and the strength of her blood had only begun.  “That means that you and I, my dear Roxanne, are meant for a place exactly such as this.  We can grow strong here again.  We will best our enemy, or enemies, I promise you that.”

            “You can’t know that.”

            “Such glumness.  Such gloom.  My dear, you must learn to trust me. I am Count Andreas Petofi.  I am infallible.”

            “Not entirely.  You’ve been banished before.”

            “Never for long,” Petofi said, his smile fading a bit.  “And I don’t care to be reminded of those times.  At any rate, from each ending, a new beginning.  The world changes, and you must never forget it.”

            “Isn’t that what we’re attempting to prevent, though?” Roxanne said.  She felt drained, exhausted.  She hadn’t fed in three days, and the lack of nutrition was beginning to show.  Her hair no longer gleamed with crimson fire, and there were deep-cut lines developing beneath her eyes.  Her gums had receded so that her fang-teeth were always visible now.  “Perhaps what the Enemy wants is what is supposed to happen.  Perhaps it really is time for all the worlds to end.”

 

 

            “Nonsense,” Petofi chuckled heartily.  “If you really believed that in the depths of your non-beating heart, you would never have expended so much of your own energy to bring each of us back the way you have.”

            “Edith –”

            He waved the Hand dismissively.  “So you’ve lost a soldier or two.  That’s what happens in a war.  And they were weak.  Weak, Roxanne.  Edith, Nathan, even dear Danielle.  We are better off without them.  And … there are others.  Yet to be summoned.”

            “Perhaps.”  Yet, still she sighed.  “I have no idea what to do next.  For the first time in a hundred years.  That scares me silly.”

            “You don’t strike me as a woman who scares easily.”

            “Once,” and she chuckled.  “As a human, a mortal, oh sure!  Collinsport is a place of intense Darkness, as you yourself have pointed out.  When I lived here with my sister, I never knew exactly what was out there, lurking in the shadows.  But I found out.  And it terrified me.”

            “Until you took that Darkness for yourself,” Petofi said soothingly.  “Until you allowed it to transform you that you might better own it for yourself.  You must allow that to happen again, dearest, darlingest Roxanne.  You must find strength in the Dark so that we might triumph.”

            She touched his face lightly with the back of her hand.  “You are a marvelous man, Count.  Do you know that?”

            His chuckle was booming, hearty.  “So I have been told, but rarely by a woman of such grace and beauty as you possess.  We will triumph, Roxanne.  You must never doubt that.  You must never doubt yourself.”

           

            “I doubt your doubt,” a pleasant voice said from above them, and both vampire and sorcerer jumped, taken by surprise, and lifted their heads.

            Angelique and Laura floated above them, held in place by the power of the witch-goddess, silver, sparkling.  Both women wore matching mocking smiles.

 

            “Laura Collins!” Roxanne gasped.  “But I …”  Anger flooded her and she bared her fangs.  “…I  brought you here!  I brought you back to this world so that you might save your son!”

            “My son is in no danger,” Laura purred.  “I have the power now, Miss Drew.  Or,” and she flashed her spectacular smile in the direction of her companion who nodded back at her happily, “should I say, we have the power?”

            “I believe we do,” Angelique agreed.  “I believe we do indeed.”

            “My dear Angelique.  You have grown in stature since last we sparred,” Petofi said, and bowed stiffly.  When he rose, he held the Hand aloft.  It snapped and crackled with black scrawls of energy.  “However, now I find that –”

            “Boring,” Angelique said, yawning, and snapped her fingers.

            Petofi, mid-sentence, disintegrated.

            First his eyes fell in.  His hair, curling, curling, curling, curled finally into non-existence.  His teeth scattered out of his skull and exploded into tiny mushrooms of dust when they struck the monastery’s stone floor.  His clothes faded, turned white, and shivered into threads and then into nothing.  For a moment only a skeleton jumped and jigged, held up by the invisible power in the Hand, itself sadly reduced to bones; then the power exploded outward, and the bones clattered to the ground, shattering into splinters and beyond as they did so.

            The dissolution took under two seconds.

            Roxanne screamed.

 

            “The spoils of war,” Angelique said brightly.  “Or not.  Look, Laura dearest.  Not even the Hand remained, and it supposedly held some of the most potent magicks known to this world.”

            “I avoid magic whenever possible,” Laura sniffed.  “Too unstable.”

            “You’ll pay for this,” Roxanne snarled.

            “Oh, I sincerely doubt it,” Angelique said.  “In fact, it seems that the only person paying anything around here is you.  Hubris, dear heart, hubris.  After all, if it weren’t for your thoughtful, shall we say, intervention, then my good friend Laura Murdoch Collins and I wouldn’t be the women we are today.”

            “We certainly wouldn’t.”  Laura tittered.  Flames danced on her tongue and between her teeth.

            “I only wanted to make things better,” Roxanne wailed.  “I wanted to do the right thing!”

            “No such an animal,” Angelique said.  “Darling.  Look.  The world is about to end.  You might spend it doing something you enjoy.  Cut a bloody swath through Collinsport would be my recommendation.  Because after all,” and she cast a pointed glance in Laura’s direction, “you haven’t much time left.”

            Laura nodded, smiled, then spread wide her arms.  She threw back her head and cried, “Let the fire come, great Ra … let it come!”

            “She loves this part,” Angelique told Roxanne confidentially.

            And balls of fire, rolling out of nowhere, engulfed the great hall. 

            Screaming, hissing like a scalded cat, Roxanne flung herself against a wall.  “You’ll be sorry!” she shrieked, fading, growing misty and indistinct, “I swear it!  I swear it!”

            She was gone, and the women were alone.

 

            “You giant ham,” Angelique said to Laura.

            Laura, points of fire glinting in her eyes, only smiled.  “I do enjoy melodrama,” she said.

            The women linked hands.  “Shall we?” Angelique said.

            Nodding, Laura said, “Onward and upward!”

            And they vanished, leaving the fire to consume the monastery and, eventually, the rest of the island.  Only the water stopped it from continuing on to the mainland, and even then the fire hissed and crackled its hostility until nearly three in the morning, when a particularly heavy snowstorm finally put out its final, baleful spark.

5

            “I don’t like this,” Carolyn whispered.  The Professor smiled his broad smile and took her hand between both of his and squeezed it.

            “We’ve been training for this,” he whispered back.  “You’re going to be fine.  You’re stronger than ever.  You’re ready for this.”

            “I couldn’t do this without you,” she said, and smiled tightly.  Then it faded.  “Professor, is this really the right thing to do?”

            “We’ll find out, won’t we?” he said, and chuckled.

 

            Across the drawing room from where they stood together, before the fireplace, which provided their only illumination, Julia, Barnabas, the mortal Angelique, and Elizabeth arranged the round table and its chairs to their satisfaction.  As Carolyn watched, Angelique gingerly placed a candelabra in the center of the table.  “The Candles of the Seven Secrets,” she had explained.  “Long used to extract information from the spirit world.  Or,” and a secret smile had danced upon her lips, “to banish hostile energy.  If something … unpleasant … should appear to us, we may simply snuff the candles to send it back to the void.”

            “When should we tell them?” Carolyn said now to the Professor.

            “After the séance,” he said.  She looked pained, and he patted her comfortingly on the shoulder.  “We need to be certain before we lead everyone over a cliff.”

            “I suppose you’re right,” she sighed.  “I’d just feel better if we knew that it would really and truly work.”

            “I believe that Julia Hoffman’s research may bear us out,” he said.  “She’s been looking into the mid-nineteenth century of your family’s history, and this woman you saw during your experience during the last séance –”

            “Leticia Faye,” Carolyn said.  “She came to Collinwood in 1840 with Gerard Stiles and disappeared shortly afterward.  No one ever found out what became of her.”

 

            “We will,” Stokes said, and he squeezed Carolyn’s hand again reassuringly. 

            “You may take your seats now,” Angelique said.

            “Without your powers,” Barnabas said to her, “are we certain that this will even work?”

            “I don’t need my powers to hold a séance,” Angelique said tightly.

            “She’s right,” Julia interjected swiftly.  “Angelique and I have been quite successful at contacting the spirit world in the past.”

            Elizabeth, who looked pale, simply shook her head.

            Carolyn crossed the room and laid a hand on her shoulder.  “Mother, are you sure about this?” she said.  “You don’t have to –”

            “I do, though,” Elizabeth said.  “I refuse to cower in the dark any longer.  It’s time that I took action.  And if something I can do will help save my family, then by God I won’t just cover my face and pretend it’s not happening!”

            “Bravo, Mrs. Stoddard,” Stokes said, and applauded lightly.

            Elizabeth permitted herself a tiny smile, then sat at the table.  “Please join me, all of you,” she said, and, one by one, they did as they were bade, casting nervous glances at each other and sharing small smiles.

            “The fingers must touch,” Angelique said.  “Spread out your hands on the table.”  They obeyed.  Angelique closed her eyes and lifted her chin.  “Spirits around us,” she intoned, “those who watch us and who know.  Hear our plea to you.”

 

            “Hear us,” the others echoed her.

            Angelique’s face had grown beatific.  “Open the door.  We seek guidance in this most crucial hour.  Our enemies are aligned against us.  We beg your assistance so that we might fight these forces and triumph!  Spirits!  Do not ignore this supplication!”

            Carolyn’s eyes closed.  She hardly felt them go.  Of course it would be me, she thought dimly, dazedly as she descended; her training in the psychic arts, as Stokes referred to them, had progressed more quickly than either of them anticipated, especially after her visitation from the Enemy in the guise of her once-beloved Tony Trask.  “It’s trying to scare me,” she had told Eliot the next day, “and it has – I’m frightened.  But I’m angry too.  My god, Professor, this thing wants to wipe us all out, and it’s using people we love to do it!  Do you know how disgusted that makes me feel?  I want to fight it.  I want to keep fighting it.”  And so more crystal gazing (scrying, he called it), more practice trances, more Latin phrasing learned, the names of archangels, protective chants, all to strengthen her so that she could be the warrior she wanted to be, the force she must become if they were to triumph.

            I’m so sorry, Tony.  I will always be sorry.  So I do this for you, and for everyone else this curse has touched.  I will end it, I swear it.

            “… she’s going into the trance …”  Was that Barnabas?  She was hardly able to look at him, but she must, she must find it in herself to forgive him for the way he had treated her, the way he had raped her …

            “… darling?  Carolyn?  Oh my god …”  That was her mother, who only wanted to help.  Would she survive the battle?  Carolyn felt something dark and uncertain, and she wanted to scream …

            “…she’s strong, Mrs. Stoddard …”  Angelique or Stokes?  She wasn’t sure.  Maybe both.  They believed in her.  They understood her.

            And so she let herself go.

            Help us … help us, please, we need help …

            “Come with me.”

            She opened her eyes and gasped.

            The woman standing before her was Victoria Winters.

 

            She was human, smiling, restored, whole.  Her hands were folded placidly before her.  She was as Carolyn remembered her on the first night she came to Collinwood.  God, it felt forever ago.  Nevertheless, she felt a spike of fear pierce her.  “I am who you think I am,” the woman before her said. 

            “You’re not that other girl, are you?” Carolyn said.  She glanced around.  They were in the drawing room, but it was different somehow.  The table was not set for a séance, and they were the only two people in the room.  She looked back, but it was still Vicki:  still wearing the plain, drab suit she wore her first night at Collinwood, her hair restored to its lustrous dark shade, no traces or streaks of white; her eyes were brown and human, not the oil-slick pools that had glared at Carolyn and David as she had tried to …

            “No,” Vicki said, and laughed softly.  “No, I am not my sister.  Nor am I the monster you fear, the one who tried her best to kill you.”

            “You shouldn’t laugh,” Carolyn said furiously.  “You shouldn’t joke!”  Pain and fury choked her like vines.  “You killed my Uncle Roger!”

            “I did,” Vicki said calmly, nodding.  “And I would’ve killed the rest of you.  And I am sorry.  There’s no excuse for what I did, and there’s no making up for it.  But I continue to try.  Somehow, I am able to – am allowed – to try.”

            “You won’t be able to make it up.”  Tears burned her eyes.  “Go away!  I never want to see you again!”

            “I am here to help you, Carolyn,” Vicki said, and took a step forward.

            “No!” Carolyn screamed, and turned, and ran …

            … and the door to the drawing room opened …

            … and Carolyn, blasted backward by a white light that was more like something living and aware than anything so simple as light, blinked, collected herself, and turned …

 

            … and gasped at the sight of her Uncle Roger, restored, alive, standing beside and slightly behind her mother, who peered out the opened drawing room windows and into the night.  She was beautiful, younger, it seemed to Carolyn, regal in a long black dress and wearing her best pearls.  That’s how she looked on the night Vicki arrived, Carolyn thought, wondering.

“A watched pot never boils,” Roger purred, “to coin a phrase.”

Elizabeth didn’t stir, but her tone was irritated.  “Don’t you think you ought to look in on your son?” she sniped.

“The little monster’s asleep,” he chuckled, “and I'm delighted. I choose my words with infinite precision.”

“Roger,” Elizabeth said, and Carolyn could almost believe she was sad, “you’re a fool.”

He sneered at her.  “Not one tenth the fool you are, my dear. Look at you, standing at the window looking out into the night, waiting for someone who should never have been asked to come here in the first place.”

 

“She'll work out very well, I'm sure.”

“Doing what ... holding my little son's hand? Comforting you when the shutters creak? Elizabeth, with all our ghosts we don't need any strangers in this house and you know it.”

“I think I can be the judge of that.”

“But you don't even know the girl. Elizabeth, I'm your brother, I'm thinking only of your own welfare. Why bring somebody all the way up from New York to do something we're perfectly capable of handling ourselves?”

“Because I choose to do so."

            Now Roger revealed his true feelings:  the fury, the disgust … but why?  What secrets did he have to hide?  Carolyn wondered.  “Oh come to your senses, Elizabeth. When the girl arrives give her a month's salary and tell her to go back to where she came from. Why don't you open the door so that the whole town comes trooping through the house and have done with it?”

“The girl will stay.”  And that, Carolyn knew, was her mother’s final word.  It’s her, she thought; it’s really her.  It’s both of them.

“You are a fool, Elizabeth,” Roger sneered.  Carolyn watched  her mother’s shoulders tightened, her face.  “Yes, you are. Inviting problems …”

Elizabeth whirled to face him.  “The only problem I've invited is standing before me at this moment. I've asked Miss Winters to live here and she'll stay.”  And Elizabeth stalked out of the drawing room, leaving Roger to hold his snifter so tightly that it cracked and shivered into broken shards, cutting his hand so that the blood ran down …

  

Carolyn!

Vicki calling, and Carolyn tried to scream, couldn’t find her voice, but she must run, must get away, away …

… the Blue Whale, and she was there, younger looking, all blonde hair and frugging?  Yes, frugging, and why was Joe Haskell there, my god, I dated him, like, a million years ago, and he looks so angry …

 …staring up at the portrait of Jeremiah Collins, her face scrawled into a twist of hatred and a heartbreaking sorrow:  “When I was ten years old I used to dream that a white knight would come along and rescue me from this dungeon. I guess white knights have gone out of style.” 

 I would never do anything to hurt my own flesh and blood! and her own drilling screams…

 

I don’t want a sedative; I only want Jeb! and a man with blonde hair fell from the edge of Widow’s Hill and they screamed in unison, and she felt the pain in her doppelganger’s eyes …

             … and the world trembled again, and that light flared …

            Not my world; similar but different somehow, fundamentally, but how?  Why?

            And now she stood in a room colder than the Collinwood she knew, the edges sharper, strewn with antiques and furniture, and she backed away, a scream forming and dying in her mouth, because she was looking at herself, sprawled before the door in a pink ballgown, her hair tousled and unkempt, her face ghastly white and her china-blue eyes staring, staring, because she was dead, and there was blood, god, so much blood staining her shoulders, streaming out of two giant wounds in her throat …

 

 

 

            “No,” Carolyn cried, “he did it to me, he did it after all, he killed me, he killed me,” and Vicki was beside her, Vicki’s face was sympathetic, Vicki was trying to say something, but Carolyn ran from her …

 

            … and a man who looked like Chris Jennings, chest bared, flesh pale and taut, stood before her own image again, but this time she was clad in a long white nightgown, and this nightmare version that Chris protected sported enormous fangs that she bared before the policemen who danced around her, shoving cross after cross into her face …

 

             “This isn’t real,” Carolyn cried, but the world trembled again and she stood in yet another mansion that didn’t resemble the Collinwood she knew and loved and yet, somehow, somehow it did …

 

             She turned; an ancient freak with bald head and glaring eyes throttled Julia Hoffman, sank his fangs into Maggie Evans; Professor Stokes, fangs bared, attacked a man Carolyn had never seen before, then screamed as the man pumped bullet after bullet into his chest …

 

            … Uncle Roger, fangs bared, hissed as that same stranger rammed a wooden bolt into his chest …

             “Stop running, Carolyn,” Vicki pleaded.  “It’s what the Enemy wants.  It’s trying to trap you, to stop you from telling what you know …”

            Quentin and a dark-haired girl Carolyn had never seen before, his fingers wrapped around her throat;

        

    

             A witch is hanged in the garden … she’ll be back …

            Angelique in a diaphanous gown, her face translucent, her eyes glaring, fish-white hands reaching, reaching …

             “No,” Carolyn screamed, shaking her head, “no, stop, no please stop no no no” but she ran and she ran, and the world shifted, the world breathed, and Collinwood was different again –

            A girl with dark hair and strange clothes followed another woman with strange clothes – my god, was that a leather skirt? – and tousled golden hair up an enormous staircase, and before them was a portrait of a handsome man in eighteenth century garb, and somehow Carolyn knew that this was yet another iteration before her, that this was a Victoria Winters and another Carolyn Stoddard and that the portrait was of Barnabas …

 

            “This place is huge,” the dark haired girl said.  “How many rooms are there?”

            “I don’t think anyone really knows,” the golden-haired girl replied with a mysterious little smile dimpling her lips.  Her voice was low and throaty, seductive.  “Anyway, most of them are closed off now, but there are a lot.”

 

            “This isn’t real!” Carolyn shrieked, and before her, the golden-haired woman thrashed in the arms of a nightmare, another monster, a creature older than time, its head bald, its eyes yellow and red, like blood, and its fangs were digging into her throat …

 

             Then the old man was gone, and he was the handsome Barnabas Carolyn she recognized from the portrait, and they were kissing, and he was whispering to her, “Blood of my blood, kin of my kin:  soon you will walk with me as my partner in the night.”

 

            No no no no no no no no …

            Dark-haired Victoria clutches a woman who somehow resembled Carolyn’s mother, and stares at Barnabas, handsome, terrified Barnabas, and he freezes because she knows …

             The worlds continued to tear as Carolyn ran through them as if they were nothing but thin sheets of tissue paper. 

            Another man who could only be another Barnabas stood beside a pretty young woman with short blonde hair, and together they gazed at a portrait whose subject could be the twin of the blonde girl …

 

            “This is the way you found it?” the girl said.

            The handsome man nodded.  “For some reason the door had been plastered over.  It’s exactly the way it looked over two hundred years ago.”

            “It’s like walking back in time,” the blonde girl breathed.

             He’ll kill you! Carolyn tried to cry, but the words stopped; there was a corpse now, a hideous rotted corpse in a red dress with glowing black eyes, and it was reaching for her …

 

            “Let me help you!” Vicki cried, reaching for her.  “Please, Carolyn, please!”

            Running, running, running, and she was in the foyer, only it was enormous, and it was in flames.  There were carvings everywhere:  of mermaids, of great fish, creatures of the sea, and they moved, horribly, and one of them gripped Barnabas in its ferocious wooden arms; atop the staircase a blonde woman who somehow, and Carolyn couldn’t have said how, but somehow resembled her mother held a wolfen monster in her arms and sobbed (she isn’t me, Carolyn told herself; that tiny terrible creature can’t be me).  And a woman who could only be Angelique clambered atop the white-faced man in the grip of the statue, purring obscenities …

 

            “It goes on and on like this,” Vicki whispered at her side.

            “Make it stop,” Carolyn whispered.

            Fangs bared, hands clutching Julia Hoffman, Barnabas snarled, “Madam!  I am neither good nor gentle.  And I do not forgive!”  And sank them into her throat …

 

            “He always kills her,” Carolyn moaned.  “Or he kills me.  Please, Vicki … please, I don’t want to see these things, please …”

           

            Collinwood ablaze.  The blonde woman bringing two children close to her said, “We’ll do what we’ve always done:  we will endure.”

            “I have tried my best to change things,” Victoria said to Carolyn, and turned her gently away from the flames.  “These are other worlds, other possibilities.  The story of the Collins family is important.  It appears again and again, and dies, and then rises and goes on and on.  It endures, as your mother just said.”

            “That isn’t –”

            “She is,” Vicki said firmly.  “Every world.  Every world is important.  And you’re going to save them, just as I tried to do.”

            Carolyn’s eyes widened.  She understood suddenly; and the knowledge was bright and glimmering inside her.  “It was you!  It was you who brought Julia back to life, who –”

            Vicki lowered her eyes.  “Dr. Hoffman didn’t need me to bring her back to life,” she said quietly.  “I simply removed her from the loop in which she had become trapped.”  She sighed, and looked around; all the worlds were there now, and she nodded in the direction of one.  Colorless, black and white somehow, like an old movie, and a much younger looking Carolyn and an impossibly innocent Vicki explored the newly restored interior of the Old House together.  “We were friends in this world,” she sighed.  “Close friends.  We were never allowed that comfort in our world.  I’m sorry, Carolyn.”

 

 

            “You want to save us,” Carolyn whispered.  “You really do.  Oh, Vicki …”  And flung her arms around the other woman.

            Vicki allowed this for a moment, then gently pushed Carolyn away.  “I can’t stay much longer,” she said.  “I’m here to help you, as I helped Julia.  You would become trapped here otherwise, which would serve the Enemy’s purpose, until such time as it is successful, becomes flesh, frees itself from the tomb where it is trapped, and destroys all of these worlds.  Then it will be as if the Collins family never existed … anywhere.”

            “You can help me go back?”  Carolyn’s face was wet and streaked with her tears.

            “I can,” Vicki said.  Her face grew sad, then stony.  “You must be strong, Carolyn.  Something terrible is coming, and I can’t stop it.  My powers are limited now.”  She took a deep breath.  “I want you to be strong. Professor Stokes … Professor Stokes is right.  Find Leticia Faye.  She will guide you.  And be strong.  You know you are.  Never forget it.”  Vicki’s face was beginning to glow with light like tiny white pearls, but Carolyn saw that the light came from inside her and was now leaking, bursting out of her, and it was bright, so bright …

            … exploding stars, births and deaths, supersupersupernovas …

            … she put her hands up to shield them from the brilliance …

            … caught one last glimpse of Vicki, and she was smiling, and her hand, the fingertips glowing with that same wondrous whiteness, brushed Carolyn’s forehead …

            And, gasping, she reared back from the table where the other members of the séance looked at her with white, blank faces, and Carolyn gasped, “I know!  I know!  I know what will happen!”

            “Miss Stoddard?” Professor Stokes said, stood, reached for her –

            “I know what will happen too,” a man’s deep voice, gloating, echoed throughout the room, and Carolyn, a scream rising to her lips, remembered Vicki’s words:  “Something terrible is coming, and I can’t stop it …”

            Gerard Stiles stood beside them, his face green, the lips split into an enormous grin of triumph, and one hand drew back, clenched into a fist, and before any of them could move, he drove it forward.

            Into the chest of Eliot Stokes.

            Stokes’ eyes widened, his mouth gaped, and then ejected an enormous stream of blood, black in the lunatic firelight.  It covered Stiles’ face, and his grin grew even wider, and as the others pushed away from the table, screaming, Carolyn saw the beast-man’s tongue flicker out from behind those sensual lips and lap at the blood, drawing it into his mouth.

            Then he pulled his fist back out of Eliot’s chest, and he was holding the heart, his black and furiously pumping heart, and it was too much, too much, and so Carolyn screamed as the Professor collapsed to the floor.  His body twitched once, one hand grasped at the carpet, and then he lay still.

            “So much for knowledge,” Gerard said, and licked the blood from his fist.  He smiled then, and reached for Carolyn with his gore-streaked hands.  “Now,” he said brightly, reaching, reaching, “let’s see what we can’t do about the things you know.”

TO BE CONTINUED ...