Shadows on the Wall Chapter 115

CHAPTER 115:  Transcending Time

 by Nicky

Voiceover by Nancy Barrett:  “The end is near, and everyone on the great estate of Collinwood can feel it.  For on this night, the monster-man Gerard Stiles murdered Eliot Stokes … and Carolyn Stoddard will be next.”

1

Now.

 

 

            “We have to go back.”

            “That’s not possible.  Angelique said –”

            “I don’t care what Angelique said.  There must be a way.  You made it happen, after all; if we’re not allowed to travel backward at all, then how did you return from the future?”

            “I … I don’t know.”

            “Eliot is dead.  Who’s next?  This thing won’t stop until we’re all so much carrion meat.  Or its slaves.”

            “What do you propose, then?  The parallel time room?  A … ha … a staircase that allows you to travel through time?  When will this madness end, Barnabas?”

            “The I Ching then?”

            “It’s too dangerous.  I won’t allow you to –”

            “My body.”

            “What about it?”

            “It disappeared.  When Danielle Roget knocked away the I Ching wands that terrible night, something happened that pulled me out of 1897.  And somehow I was returned to the present … but I had become a vampire again.”

            “Your body is here.  I’m looking at it right now.”

            “There is no need for sarcasm, Doctor.”

            “Oh dear me.  I must have lost my head.”

            “That will do.  And I’m being serious.  When I tried the I Ching, my essence, my soul-self, whatever you want to call it, astral body – that is what travelled to the past and met Vicki.  She opened the coffin in the secret room and freed me, and the only reason I didn’t slaughter her was because my twentieth century consciousness possessed my nineteenth century body.  Don’t you see?”

            “Only vaguely.”

           

            “Don’t be obtuse.”

            “Don’t be cruel!”

            “I’ll grant you that.  I apologize.  But you must understand what this means.  When the Roget creature swept the I Ching wands off the table …”

            “… your body was pulled out of the past …”

            “… and deposited here.  That’s what happened; it must be.  That’s why I’m a vampire again.  This body that stands before you … this is the body that truly belongs in 1897.  Which begs the question –”

           

            “— where is your twentieth century body?”

            “Exactly.  And if we can find the answer to that … perhaps we have a chance at undoing some of the wrongs that have happened here.  Perhaps … perhaps we really do stand a chance.”

2

            Five days ago:

 

            “So much for knowledge,” the mongrel-dog-madman that called itself Gerard Stiles said, and licked the blood from his fist.  The blood came from the still-beating heart of Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, now sadly dispatched; his body, the eyes staring, the mouth agape, lay where it had fallen on the floor of the Collinwood drawing room.  The hands grasped at the carpet once, and then relaxed.  Gerard, watching this display, smiled then, and reached for Carolyn Stoddard with his gore-streaked hands.  “Now,” he said brightly, reaching, reaching, “let’s see what we can’t do about the things you know.”

            Carolyn, disoriented, backed away from the table; her ankle caught around the leg of her chair and sent her sprawling.  Stiles pounced; Liz cried out; but Carolyn swung around with her right elbow and struck him squarely in the mouth.  His lips split back and immediately began to gush blood.  “Bastard,” she spat, and kicked at him with one blue spiked heel.  Howling, Gerard fell backward.

            Barnabas raised his cane and swung it in Stiles’ direction; “Eliot,” Julia sobbed, and dropped beside the fallen Professor, “Eliot, Eliot …”

            “You won’t get away with this, Stiles!” Barnabas roared.  His good eye blazed a baleful crimson, shot through with streaks of gold, and his fangs were longer and sharper than Julia had seen them.  She moaned softly as Barnabas struck out again with the cane.  It glanced off Stiles’ skull; the other man reeled backward, pinwheeling his arms, the ridiculous-looking black frock coat he wore hissing as his arms sliced the air.

           

            But, incredibly, he was laughing.  And grinning.  And when he grinned, his enormous white teeth were stained red-black from the blood still trickling from the lip Carolyn split.  “Fools,” he chuckled.  “Fools, fools.  Do you think my Master hasn’t waited for this moment?  I am more than just his dogsbody; don’t you see that?  He will save my life at any cost, even the life of a pitiful pedagogue …” And he chuckled more dark laughter, and raised his hand high so they could see that he still held the Professor’s bloodied heart.  “… like this one,” he finished.

            Angelique had stayed by the table.  Now she lifted a candle snuffer and began to dowse the flames on the candelabra.  “The Seven Secrets are not given to mortal man,” she intoned in a low voice.  “But their pronunciations are well known to the Seven Princes of Hell.  I call upon them now to take back the light and restore darkness to this place.  Restore the darkness and call your servant home!  I name thee:  Lucifer …” One candle out.

            “Get out of this place,” Barnabas growled.  His hands were stretching into long, nightmarish claws, each one glinting in the light of the candles.  He held aloft his cane again.  “Now!”

            “Mammon,” Angelique whispered, and snuffed, “Asmodeus, Leviathan …”

            “I’m not leaving this place until this girl dies,” Gerard declared and thrust a finger in Carolyn’s direction.  “If I may be permitted, a small cliché … she knows too much!”

            “Beelzebub,” snuff, “Amon,” snuff …

            “Now, my dear,” Gerard said, and moved with serpent’s speed to Carolyn’s side before the others could draw a breath; and in that moment he seized her head in both his hands, one on her crown and one below her jaw.  His muscles tensed; he grinned; in a moment he would twist his hands sharply to the right, and the sound of Carolyn’s neck snapping would echo throughout the entire house …

            But:

            “Belphegor!” Angelique cried; Gerard snarled like a dog, but she had snuffed out the final candle, and before their startled eyes, Gerard faded like mist evaporating and passed from their sight.

 

            Carolyn, sobbing, collapsed to the carpet and lay there, shivering, until Elizabeth reached her side and wrapped her in her arms.

            “The Candles did their job well,” Angelique said.  She seemed exhausted, drained, and supported herself by leaning on the table.  But no one seemed to notice her.

3

           

Now:

Julia and Barnabas stood together in the drawing room of the Old House.  He peered out the window, gnawing on one knuckle, while she watched him appraisingly from behind.  “I think it is a terrible risk,” she pronounced distinctly, and he spun around to face her.

            “So you have said,” he replied in as arch a tone as she had ever heard him, “so many times now.”

            “What can you possibly accomplish?” she said.  “Besides undoing the very fabric of time?”

            “Hyperbole, Julia,” he said softly, but she was raging, whirling away from him with her hands gesticulating wildly through the air, and thus ignored him.

            

            “Perhaps there is a reason we are not allowed to meddle with time any longer, Barnabas,” she said.  “Perhaps we have already meddled too much.”

            “Vicki saved the Collins family.  She saved you!”

            “And why should my life mean more or less than anyone else’s?” Julia snapped.  “She might have saved John Kennedy while she was at it.  Or Abraham Lincoln.  For god’s sake, Barnabas, why are we so important?  Why is the light focused on us?”

            “You heard what Carolyn said about her experience at the séance.”

            Julia’s hands trembled; she longed, Barnabas knew, for a cigarette, but for some reason she was denying herself the pleasure.  He didn’t understand, and couldn’t waste time trying now.  “I have serious doubts about what she saw.”

            Barnabas raised his eyebrows.  “Do you doubt that she saw Victoria Winters?  Julia, doesn’t her interference make a sort of cosmic sense?  Perhaps her spirit is restless and seeks to atone.”

            Julia narrowed her eyes.  “Don’t start your obsessing all over again, Barnabas.  I thought we were all over this after we left Parallel Time.”

            “I am not rekindling my feelings for Vicki,” Barnabas said with what he felt was infinite patience.  “But I believe Carolyn.”

            “What about the rest of it?  That she saw us – or versions of us – in different lives, different places?  That makes no sense.”

            “It makes all the sense in the world.  Why shouldn’t there exist other worlds, other lands?  We’ve visited one.”

            “One,” she said acidly.

            “I don’t understand this hostility, Julia.”

             “Because Carolyn saw you kill me!” she exploded.  “Twice, Barnabas!  In all those realities, whatever force guided her showed her our relationship and you killed me both times!”

             He watched her carefully for a moment.  Her eyes were wet and furious at the same time, and finally she spun away from him and stood, her hands clenched into fists.  “You do believe it, don’t you,” he said softly at last.

            “Of course.”  Her voice was muffled.  “I’m not an idiot, Barnabas.”

            He hesitated.  “No,” he said, then, firmly,  “you aren’t.  Julia.”  He stood behind her; her placed his hands on her shoulders, and at first they were like boulders and he couldn’t move them, but finally she relaxed back against him and allowed him to kneed them.  “I will never harm you,” he said firmly.

            “You harm me all the time,” she whispered.

            He hesitated.  “I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. 

            “You say that,” she said.  “Barnabas, Barnabas, we have had this conversation before.”

            “I want everyone to be safe,” he confessed, “and that includes you.  I am not pursuing Victoria or Angelique or even Josette.  I promise you.  I want to save my family.”

            “And you think that travelling back in time is the answer?”  She shook her head. 

           

            “Angelique said that Gerard was banished, but only for a short time.  He will return.  The Enemy is through playing with us.  You can sense that, can’t you?”

            “Yes,” she said after a time.

            “Then we must try.  If we don’t try, we are nothing, and he – it – they – will pick us off, one by one.  We must be strong, Julia.”

            She turned to face him.  Her eyes were dry, her jaw firm.  In that moment he thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.  “Stop looking at me like that,” she said immediately.  “You don’t mean it.  You think you do, you think that I’m beautiful or brave or strong or something else that put that gleam into your eye, and I want you to put it out right this moment.  I will not be your Josette or Vicki or Angelique, and I’m not convinced that you are done hunting for her, whoever she is.  I’m not sure that you ever will be.”  She pulled away from him and stood a little ways apart.  She took a breath.  “But ultimately … ultimately, none of that matters.  Because you’re right.  The entire world is in danger, and it falls to us to save it.  To do that, we must be brave and we must be clever.”

            He drew an unnecessary breath.  “You’ll stand with me then?”

            “I will always stand with you,” she said, and he felt something old and rusty, something he wasn’t even aware continued to hold him back, finally loosen.  This is what hope feels like, he thought, wonderingly; this is relief.

            She took his hand and squeezed it.  “What is your plan?”

4

            Carolyn was shivering, shadows, dark and heavy, encircled her eyes, and she was thinner than Barnabas recalled, but she was there, she was with them, and that, he supposed was something.  “I don’t know if this will work,” she said.  “I’m not … I’m still not very good at this.  Any of this.”

            “You’re stronger than you know,” Julia said, and touched her hair lightly, soothingly.  “Eliot knew it.  That’s why he wanted to help you.”

            Carolyn drew in a ragged breath.  “I want to cry every time you mention his name,” she said.  “But I don’t have any tears left.”  She dropped  her head.  “I let him down,” she whispered.

            “You didn’t,” Julia said immediately, fiercely.  Carolyn looked  up at her, eyes wide and wounded.  “Carolyn, not at all.”

            “You can say that,” and Julia winced, hearing her own words of earlier that evening thrown back at her.

            “What would the Professor say,” Angelique, at her other side, and with decidedly less tenderness, said, “what would he say if he heard you now?”

            Carolyn sighed.  “H-he’d say … he’d say …”  Despite what she had said, a single tear slid from her right eye and shimmered down her cheek.  “He’d say that I have to be strong.  That we’re fighting a war and that there are always c-casualties in a war.  That I have to keep fighting.”

            “And so you are,” Angelique said, and allowed herself a tiny smile.  “And so are we all.”  Her eyes scanned the room:  Barnabas, Julia, and Quentin, who joined them, he said, only out of obligation to Eliot Stokes.  “He was my friend,” Quentin had said as they took the body away, and swirled his whiskey idly in its tumbler; “He saved me over and over again.  And when the time came for me to return the favor, where was I?”  The question was, of course, rhetorical, so neither Barnabas nor Julia, his reluctant confessors, had said a word.  They could only wince as he had hurled the tumbler with perfect precision at the fireplace, where it exploded like a bomb, then stalked silently and furiously from the room. 

             Now he stood with them, sober, or seemingly sober, with his arms crossed, leaning against the wall of the Parallel Time room.  “This,” he said suddenly, “seems like a spectacularly terrible idea.”

            “Quentin,” Julia said softly.  “We all agreed –”

            “Not the plan,” he said.  “I mean the location.  How do we know that this room won’t suddenly change and sweep us all of to some hell-world for the rest of eternity?”

            “We don’t,” Angelique snapped.  Since the Professor’s death she had been extraordinarily on edge, even more than the others.  “But since none of us possesses much in the way of real magic at this moment, tapping into the power this room already has in abundance is the best way to make contact.”

            “I’m also not certain that making contact with any of the entities ruling this room falls under the column of good things,” he said dryly.  His ice-blue eyes flicked to the other man.  His lip curled back into a cynical snarl.  “Barnabas, you know this is insanity.”

            “Everything these days feels like insanity,” Barnabas replied calmly. 

            “Do you even know where you’re planning to go?”  Quentin’s voice was beginning to fray.  “My god, if this – this whatever it is we’re about to do actually works, do you have any clue where you’ll end up?”

            “I have a vague idea, yes,” Barnabas said.  “From what Carolyn has told us, and based on Julia’s research, we know that something happened because of Gerard Stiles and Roxanne Drew, and that it happened in or around the year 1840.  Eliot Stokes believed that a young woman who lived in the house in that year, a psychic, Julia tells me, by the name of Leticia Faye has the power to destroy Gerard forever.”

            “Which would stop the Enemy.”  Quentin was smirking.

            Barnabas ignored the pointedness of the other man’s comment.  “Possibly,” he said.  “If nothing else, it removes a piece from the board.”

 

            “Leticia Faye,” Quentin said, musing, smiling.  “I knew a Faye woman once.”  His smile faded.  “And you want to … what exactly?  Find her?  Bring her back here?”

            “Perhaps,” Barnabas said, and threw Quentin’s own smirk back at him.  “I don’t know, Quentin.  All I know is that we are standing before an abyss.  All of us.  I propose to throw myself into that abyss.”

            “Despite the consequences?”  Quentin made a sound of disgust.  “How will you even get back?”  No one said a word.  Quentin’s eyes flicked to Julia.  “You can’t let him do this,” he said.  “Julia, come on.  You know that this insanity.”

            Julia opened her mouth and then closed it tightly.  When she spoke at last, she didn’t hesitate or stammer.  “I trust Barnabas,” she said.  “I have faith in him.  You used to as well.”

            “Time travel,” Quentin snarled, and turned away.

            “We aren’t at all certain what will happen,” Angelique said.  “Quentin, you must believe that.  We don’t know if Barnabas will be allowed to find his original body, or if it even exists at all.  There’s no guarantee that he’ll be able to use it to transcend time, and if he is successful, he may only be able to behave as an audience does while watching a play.”

            “You’re there,” Quentin said suddenly.  “My god, you exist in that time as well, don’t you.”

            Angelique’s smile became feline.  “How astute you are, Quentin,” she said.  “Don’t worry about me for the time being.  In the year 1840, I am trapped quite securely behind a wall in the West Wing.  You know it well.”  Her smile faded and her eyes threw sparks.  “You put me back there, as I recall.”

 

            “And I would do it again in a heartbeat,” Quentin growled.

            “Stop it, both of you!” Carolyn cried. 

            “Carolyn’s right,” Julia said with forced pleasantness.  “We can all argue in hell.”

            “Shall we continue, Quentin?” Angelique purred.  “Or are you going to continue to pout and rage like a little boy?”

            He glared at her for a moment later, then shook his head.  “Fine,” he said.  “Just fine.  Lead us all in a round of ‘Kumbaya’ or whatever your plan is, Madame Sorceress.”

            They sat in a circle, cross-legged, like children, and as Julia sat beside her, Carolyn leaned forward and whispered, “Julia, I’m afraid.”

            Julia squeezed her hand.  “I am too,” she admitted, quietly, so the other’s wouldn’t hear her.  “But we’re doing the right thing, Carolyn.  Do you believe that?”

            “I suppose,” she said.  “I suppose we must be.”  And they locked eyes for a moment.

            “The wands,” Angelique said, and Barnabas, his flesh all tight in knots, threw them.

            They landed.

            The 49^th Hexagram.

            The Hexagram of Change.

            And there they sat, looking down at the wands:  Carolyn, flanked by Angelique and Julia, and faced by Quentin and Barnabas, who glanced at each other with a flash of sudden embarrassment before taking hands. 

            Angelique met Carolyn’s gaze, and nodded.

 

            And Carolyn closed her eyes, opened them, opened her mouth, and began.

5

            He was aware of darkness and cold – such cold that it pierced even his vampire’s flesh.  He tried to open his mouth, tried to call out for Julia, but he couldn’t move.  He was still aware of the room around him, and Carolyn’s cries to spirits of time and space, her fervid attempts to move them to action, but he couldn’t see.  He could feel that his one good eye was still open, but it didn’t offer him any images.  And he was numb because of the cold pressing down on him in waves, so cold.  But he couldn’t shiver.  His body refused to react or respond.

            Carolyn, Carolyn, calling the spirits, calling them, urging them, begging, pleading …

            And then, out in the darkness, somewhere in the outer edges of all worlds, there was a pulse of warmth.  A gasp.  A hint of breath.

            Human.

            Someone out there.

            Images began to wash over him, flashes of memory, and he allowed them to.

            The body at the table was perfectly still.  The eyes were closed, and the mouth hung slack.  Barnabas Collins — or his astral body, his essence, perhaps his soul — were gone, and only the sack of meat he had occupied for nearly two hundred years was left behind. It did not move.  It barely breathed.  Every few moments its skin would tic or twitch.

For nearly an hour he sat there, alone, while his essence lived seventy years in the past, working desperately to change things, while days and weeks and even months flew by, and still his body sat, on December 31st, 1967, nearing midnight, alone.

But not for long.

“So,” Quentin Collins said as his blonde companion closed the door behind them and knocked snow from her boots with an irritated scowl.  “Here we are at last.”

No, Barnabas tried to whisper, but his throat was frozen.  Carolyn had filled them in on the details of her time possessed by the wicked spirit of Danielle Roget, but Barnabas had never seen for himself what had transpired. 

            And then, what had occurred simultaneously (somehow) in the past …

            Petofi stood, gasping, before them.  It was obvious that the spell had taken a heavy toll on him.  He was nearly doubled over, gasping, but when he lifted his face to them he was grinning.  “So much,” he panted, “for your gypsy bitch.”

Barnabas’ eyes turned red, and he bared his fangs, hissing, while Quentin took a trembling step forward and growled, “You murderer!”

 

“Yes, Mr. Collins,” Petofi said, “a murderer indeed.  And as soon as I regain my breath, I’ll deal with you all accordingly.” But his face twisted up as if something inside were goring him, paining him dreadfully, and he held up one hand.  “I’ll murder you momentarily.  I just need ...  I just ...  need ...”  Then he turned around and began to stumble off into the depths of the forest.

“We can’t just let him get away!” Quentin cried, anguish twisting his voice.

Barnabas’ face was grim.  “He won’t,” Barnabas said.  “We just need to —”

            I was a vampire in the past, Barnabas managed to think, because my spirit possessed my nineteenth century body.  Which must be this body, the one I inhabit now.  Something happened … something happened to cause them to switch places …

            “You are the fool,” Julia’s ghost intoned.  “You are nothing.  You’re a low beast.  You will die as you have lived, I promise you that.”

“I’ll kill him before your eyes!” Carolyn shrieked, and made a mad dash for Barnabas.

In that moment Julia struck, and Carolyn was enveloped in a cloud of glowing white spectral energy.  She shrieked, and pulled at her hair and gouged her eyes, and dropped the stiletto to the floor where it lay, forgotten.  The energy writhed around her, sucking at her, tugging and pulling, until she fell away from Barnabas, gasping and clutching at her throat.  Her face was very pale, save for her cheeks, which glowed with dull red roses.

Carolyn stared hatefully at the spirit as it rematerialized, its face still glowing and holy and impassive.  “You will pay for this,” she spat.  “See if you don’t.”

And before Julia had time to react, Carolyn had lashed out ...

...  and swept the I Ching wands from the table.

            Of course, Barnabas thought; she disrupted the I Ching wands and I …

            “— regroup —”

 

The word still hung in the air even after Barnabas had vanished.

Vicki and Quentin stared after him, wide-eyed.

           

For a moment, neither said a word.

Then, “Damn,” Quentin breathed

            … I disappeared from that night in 1897, and found myself back in my own time …

Barnabas jolted upright; for a moment every vein, every muscle, every cord in his body was flexed and tightened with strain; his eyes bulged in their sockets, then rolled up to their whites.

Then he collapsed, and his heavy body rolled from the chair and crashed to the floor.

He sat up a moment later, blinking, and rubbed at his mouth, which was bleeding from the right corner.  He eyed the room dazedly, then horror overcame him as the blood bloomed copper on his tongue.

“No,” he whispered, then a cry built up in him, a wail of horror, of torment, of fear, of utter, numbing devastation.

 Because he could feel the fangs that still protruded from his aching jaw.

            And ever since then he’d been living a schizoid existence, plagued by the meddling, his and Vicki’s, with time:

He wasn’t exactly sure what had happened.  In one set of memories, he had been standing in the glade with Vicki and Quentin, prepared to rush off after Petofi and stop him before he could regain his strength.  A shock had struck him then, an utter lack of sensation, followed by darkness and a feeling of tumbling over and over into nothingness, and after what felt like an eternity he had opened his eyes, and discovered the horrible truth.  In another set of memories, he and Julia had planned to visit Chris Jennings again with an experimental serum Julia had developed, but before she had arrived, he had been stricken with a sudden pain that dashed him to the floor.  When he opened his eyes, the blood that trickled into his mouth caused the animal fangs to erupt like knives from his gums, and he knew that he had become a vampire again.  Inexplicably. 

Except that he thought there was an explanation. 

Someone disturbed the I Ching wands, he thought, though there had been no sign of any I Ching wands, because he wasn’t at Professor Stokes’ house when he awoke, because he had never gone there to find the I Ching wands, because of course he never needed them.  Nevertheless, his mind nagged him, someone did disturb them, and that must have knocked me right out of the past ...  and somehow, my body at the time came too. 

It was a paradox, and it was high past time that order was restored:  balance, Barnabas thought.

            He wasn’t aware of the others who sat beside him in the Parallel Time room, not the squeeze of Quentin’s or Angelique’s hands, not Carolyn’s chanting, only the cold, the darkness, and the breathing of the body that existed somewhere nearby.

            Mine.  My body.

            Come to me, he whispered; you are mine, you belong to me; come back, come back, come back –

            … so near, so very near …

            … breath, warmth, life …

            And then, like water pressing itself against cold stone, forcing, forcing, seeping into granite, imperturbable, yet changing nevertheless, and oh god Julia, please hear me, hear me, feel me, know me …

            Somewhere nearby (and I was so close all along, Barnabas marveled; my body was here, just waiting, just … waiting), he heard the sound of rattling, of a hand cutting the air, slow motion, slow motion, and it was Carolyn’s hand, prompted by Julia (“Do it!” the doctor cried, only inches away from Barnabas’ frozen face, her words unheard) who, once again, lashed out and swept the I Ching wands out of their current formation.

            The world stopped.

It was December 31, 1968, a year to the moment when Barnabas had last used the wands to transcend time.

            They watched, his friends, as the one-eyed body that held, in one of his, the hand of Quentin Collins and, with the other, Angelique’s, became translucent, then transparent, like glass, the outlines of Barnabas’ tortured face, until he had faded utterly away.  Carolyn opened her mouth to scream, but no sound emerged.

 

            Angelique, somehow, was smiling.  “Cast the wands, Julia,” she commanded.  “Now.  This very moment.  With me.  Help me cast the wands … together.”

6

            He opened his eyes – both of them.  That realization alone, that the damage done to him by Roxanne and her accursed dagger was now undone, caused him to smile.

            He glanced down, first at himself, then lifted his head to examine the environment in which he stood.

            He was dressed as he had been that last night in 1967, when he and the persistent spirit of Eliot Stokes conspired to use the I Ching to send his essence back to 1897 to help Victoria Winters save the Collins family.  “I’m back,” Barnabas said.  Back where?  There were no fangs, no overwhelming desire for blood that had pulsed in his brain, always there, always there, just below the surface, for the past year.  And I’m human, he thought, squinting in the darkness of what he now perceived was the Parallel Time room.  How … how is this possible?

            “Yes, you’re back,” a woman’s voice said, and Barnabas jumped, unable to help himself.  The air before him shivered, and the spirit of Julia Hoffman appeared.  "Back to the year 1897."

            “Julia!” he cried.  “You followed me backward!  But how …?”

 

            “I came to save you, my love,” the spirit’s voice whispered.  “You don’t belong here.  Right now, you are outside with Quentin and Vicki.  Petofi has destroyed Magda.  You mustn’t see each other; if you do, you will upset everything, and your actions will destroy you and everyone around you.”

            “I don’t understand,” he said, brow furrowed.  “You helped me get here!  You agreed that this was the best plan …”

           

            The spirit shook its head mournfully.  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” it said, its voice nothing truly human, the whine of the wind.  “I am dead, Barnabas.  A victim of Petofi.  I have come to you as I have tried to come to you before.  To warn you.  There is great danger.  Petofi and his devil accomplice – the woman who possesses Carolyn – they seek to destroy you.  You must return to your own time.”

            “Oh Julia,” Barnabas whispered.  He understood now.  This was the unchanged history, before Vicki had succeeded and prevented Petofi from possessing Quentin, thus stopping the terrible chain of events that culminated with Julia’s death at his monster’s hands.  I must be careful, he thought, I must not leave this room.  If I try to find Vicki and Quentin, I could undo everything … the very fabric of time itself.  Belatedly, he understood Julia’s warnings, and Angelique’s belief that none of them would be allowed to time travel again.

            But of course I can now, he thought, and that same old flame of excitement that came whenever he thought of his beloved Josette danced in his chest again.  Because those rules don’t exist here.  Whatever forces govern the universe, they didn’t impose that particular rule until after Vicki returned from 1897 … and she hasn’t done that yet.

            Which means we have a chance.  We really do.

            The ghost of Julia Hoffman opened its mouth to speak … and then a strange expression passed over its face.

            Barnabas watched it closely, cautiously.

            Sudden understanding flooded its spectral eyes, and an expression of relief and simultaneous horror passed over its face.  “Oh Barnabas,” it wailed, “Barnabas!”

 

            “Julia?” Barnabas said, and took a step toward it.

            The ghost tried to embrace him, but its arms passed through him.  “Oh Barnabas, oh no,” the ghost said.  “Oh, this is a nightmare …”

            “What happened, spirit?” Barnabas demanded.  “Tell me!”

            “I’m a ghost!” Julia cried.  Her hands, so white, the veins lacing them blue and empty, beat the air but caused no disturbance.  She looked back at him, her face tortured, her mouth gaping.  “Just look at me!  I’m dead!”

            “Of course you are,” Barnabas said, unable to prevent the tiniest crumb of impatience from creeping into his voice.  “You just told me.  Petofi killed you.”

            “No!” she wailed and stomped her ghostly foot.  “No!  I’m not dead.  I’m the Julia Hoffman you know!  We were together in the Parallel Time room in 1968 only moments ago!  You cast the wands and went into a trance, and when I thought you had gone through the door, I ordered Carolyn to scatter the wands, just as you told me to do!”

            Barnabas’ eyes were wide.  “Then how … how are you …”

            “Because of Angelique,” Julia’s ghost said miserably.  “We … we had our own plan.  And we didn’t want to tell you, because we knew you wouldn’t agree, and that it might prevent you from succeeding if you knew … if you were worried about us trying to follow you …”

            “You cast the wands again,” Barnabas said, guessing.  “And because your essence existed in this time, just as mine did, you were able to travel back.  But you don’t have a body to possess …”

            “Merely an astral body,” Julia gasped.  “Oh, Barnabas!  I’m … I’m possessing my own ghost!”

 

TO BE CONTINUED ...