Shadows on the Wall Chapter 121

CHAPTER 121:  Zuvembi

 by Nicky

Voiceover by Kate Jackson:  “Collinwood in the year 1840 … a time when the Collins family faced one of the greatest threats to its existence … for the power of Gerard Stiles has infected the governess Daphne Harridge … and the monstrous thing she has become will bring a new reign of terror to the great house …”

1

             Julia flexed her fingers, and smiled happily to herself.  Flesh and bone, she thought; who knew there’d ever come a time when I would actually miss my body?

           

            Then she remembered, and her smiled faded. 

            Oh yeah, she thought.  Being alive again means I’m back in my own time.

           

            Alone.

            Without Barnabas.

            She glanced around the drawing room, which currently held her as its only occupant.  But the other two women, she knew, would rejoin her in a moment, as soon as Carolyn could find the proper shoes from where she had stashed them in one of the many wardrobes she possessed.  Outside, thunder grumbled.  There was a storm coming – of course.  It wouldn’t be Collinwood, Julia thought ruefully, in this or any other century if there weren’t a storm brewing outside. 

            After spending several weeks inhabiting her own ghost, Julia had returned to the great house in the early spring of 1969 without Barnabas and Angelique, leaving them against her will to fend for themselves back in 1840. 

            However, she hadn’t returned completely alone.

            “Are you here to take me home?” the blonde spirit had asked as they wandered together through the shifting gray curtains of mist that seemed to comprise the only landscape of the world where they now found themselves thrown together.

            “I wish that I could,” Julia had told her, surprised.  “Do you know who I am?”

            “I feel like I almost do,” the blonde woman said.  She flickered in the gloom with a silver radiance that split the darkness and pushed away the fog.  It glowed in her eyes and in the cracks of her lips and in each strand of hair; even her teeth shimmered with silver sparks.  “Your name is Julia, isn’t it?” Leticia said, surprising even herself.

 

            “It is,” Julia said.  She glanced down at herself, and was astonished that she had a self to glance at, including hands that emerged from the frilled cuffs of the nineteenth century costume she had conjured from empty air simply by willing it the first night she and Barnabas arrived in 1840.  “And you are Leticia Faye.”

           

            “You came looking for me,” Leticia said, and squinted with sudden suspicion.  “Isn’t that right?”  Her Cockney accent grew thicker.

            “I did,” Julia admitted, then added in a rush, “but you needn’t be frightened, Leticia!  I’m from a future year, long after you lived at Collinwood.  I’m –”  She cut herself off though as she saw the fright that rounded Leticia’s already enormous cobalt eyes.  Excellent move, doctor, the sarcastic ghost-voice of the Barnabas Julia knew when she met him two years ago sniped in her mind.  This was the voice she developed to chastise herself as she and Barnabas endured adventure after excruciating adventure.  Now it said, sneering, Keep talking and she’ll flee to the other side of this wherever-you-are, and you’ll never see her again. 

And worse, you’ll never leave this place. 

It didn’t matter that the voice was her own, disguised as Barnabas.  It was right.  She had to step carefully from now on.

            “The time I lived?” Leticia squeaked.  “Does that mean … does that mean..?”  She clawed at her own face with sudden vicious terror, but instead of blood, the scratches left in the wake of her fingers filled with that same silver luminescence.  “Does that mean I’m dead, Julia?”

 

            “Not necessarily,” Julia said as soothingly as she could.  “Something happened, didn’t it, when you banished Gerard Stiles.”

            “I suppose it did,” Leticia said tearfully.  “I was so scared!  I didn’t exactly know what I was doing.  I didn’t mean it, whatever it was.  And I don’t remember exactly what happened.”  She glanced around hesitantly.  “I don’t even know how I got to this place.”

            “I don’t either,” Julia said.  “But the important thing is that we found each other.”

            “I don’t even know how long I’ve been here,” Leticia whispered.  Without seeming aware of it, she had sidled closer to Julia.

            “I’m not exactly sure what kind of a place this is,” Julia said, looking around and wrinkling her nose.  “It seems like it’s some kind of … of netherworld.  Not heaven or hell.  Like … an in-between place.  A mystical holding pen, perhaps.”

            “I don’t like the sounds of that, I can tell you.”

           

            “I don’t either.  But I don’t think we have to stay here forever.”

           

            Leticia blinked.  “What do you mean?”

            “I mean,” Julia said, and turned so she could lay both her hands on Leticia’s shoulders, “that you can get us out of here.”

            “I can’t,” Leticia said.  Her face was pinched with terror.  “Julia, don’t you think I would set myself free of this place if I could?  I’ve tried.”

            “You’ve tried by yourself, you mean.  I’m here now.”

            “You?”

           

            Her smile was tight, strained, but warm.  “Leticia, you have more power than you know.  I know; I saw it.  I saw you in action, remember.  You are strong.  You are powerful.  And so am I.”

 

            “I believe you,” Leticia whispered.  “About you, I mean.  I’m not so sure about myself.”

            “I’m sure of you.”  She released her, and glanced around the fog, the swirling eddies of nothing.  “Do you want to stay here forever?  Is that what you really want?”

            “I don’t know,” Leticia cried, and turned away.  “You say you’ve seen what I can do?  Have you seen what I have?  Gerard Stiles … he’s a beast!  A murderer!”

            “Gerard Stiles is alive in the time from which I come,” Julia said in her stoniest, most deadly tone.

            Leticia froze, then turned slowly, her face streaked with tears, to face Julia.  “Oh no,” she said.  “Oh Julia, how?  Why?”

            “He is the slave of a demonic entity we call the Enemy,” Julia said.  “This creature has the power to bring Gerard out of the void where your power consigned him and allowed him to live again.  To kill again.  That’s why we need you, Leticia.  You banished him before.  And I believe you can do it again.”

            “He tried to kill me.”  Her voice was small, a child’s.

           

            “And he failed,” Julia said fiercely.  “You have to remember that, Leticia.  He didn’t kill you; no one did.  History records that you simply vanished from Collinwood one day; of course everyone thought you died!  They couldn’t possibly know where you really were:  in a place outside time.  Waiting.  Waiting to return.”

            “You think I can do that?”

            “I know you can.”  Julia held out her hand.  “Will you take my hand, Leticia?  Will you leave this place with me?”

            Leticia looked at the other woman’s hand, then lifted her eyes to Julia’s.  They widened, then grew wider yet, and suddenly she smiled.

            And took Julia’s hand.

            Her face was wet with tears.

            And suddenly they were both galvanized by Leticia’s light, which exploded out of her and carried them both away.

2

            To the drawing room:  Collinwood, March of 1969.

            Time passed while we were in 1840, Julia thought now; “I forgot how comfortable these clothes were,” she told Leticia, after she had helped her into one of Carolyn’s miniskirts.  “So indecent,” Leticia had said darkly, but then she burst into a delighted flood of giggles.  “Julia, people will see my legs!”

            And Carolyn:  unsure of how to take this newest addition to the great estate.  “She looks just like me,” she had whispered to Julia.  “Julia, how is that possible?”

 

            “I don’t understand reincarnation,” Julia had admitted; Leticia, examining one of a pair of blue pumps, fingered the heel, then blushed prettily, and both women smiled as she did it.  “I don’t even really understand the logistics of time travel, or the place where I found Leticia after I was forced out of the past.  I don’t understand the I Ching, or how my present-time self could possess my ghost when I’ve never died, at least not to my knowledge.  But whether Leticia is a past version of you or not –”

            “She can’t be,” Carolyn said.  Julia raised an eyebrow.  “Don’t you see, Julia?  She never died.  She’s been lingering in that … that holding place you described, that weird limbo for a hundred years.  Until you helped her get out.  Brought her here.  Which means she never really died.”  Leticia, cooing, slid the pumps onto her feet, and clapped her hands, delighted as a child that they fit.  “Which means,” Carolyn said insistently, “she can’t possibly be me.”  Her voice softened.  “And yet … and yet I feel … I can’t help but feel that … maybe …”

            “She’s here to help us,” Julia said forcefully.  A thought occurred to her suddenly, and her face creased with fear.  “And you say there’s been no sign of Gerard while we’ve been gone?”

            “No,” Carolyn said, disturbed.  “It’s been nothing but quiet.  Angelique – that other Angelique, I mean – and Laura have been conspicuously absent, and so, with a few exceptions, has Roxanne.  It’s … it’s as if everything is just waiting.  Holding its breath until …”

            “Until we returned from the past,” Julia said bitterly.  “Only we haven’t, have we.”

            “Barnabas and Angelique will be back,” Carolyn said, and took the other woman’s hand.  “I can feel that; can’t you?”

            Julia hesitated.  She looked to Leticia, who, tottering, had stood up with the heels.  “How does anyone ever walk in these?” she called indignantly.

            Julia turned back to Carolyn.  “I don’t know,” she said bleakly.  “I just don’t know.”

3

            They stood outside the front door of Collinwood, he, swaying slightly, she, watching him with a poisonous smirk on her face.  “You’ll have to do better than that,” she said, then added, derisively, “husband.”

            Quentin turned to look at his new bride; his eyes were silver, without pupil or iris, and he smiled suddenly.  His teeth were stained pink.  An after effect, the Daphne-creature supposed, of the treatment she had administered him, a treatment similar but not identical to that which Gerard Stiles had administered her a few days before.  Didn’t matter; she and Quentin were married now, and bound together by their lovemaking, and she had killed him and resurrected him and now he was zombi, just as she was zuvembi, the female of her kind.  Thanks to Gerard Stiles.

            And together they would rule Collinwood, the great undead.

            If only, she thought critically, he could wake from the death-trance she had placed him under. 

            “Quentin,” she said sharply, “you’re going to have to control your appearance.  The servants will run screaming after one look at you.”

 

            “Servants,” Quentin said slowly, stupidly.  His voice was the deliberate creaking of a tomb.  And his eyes were still silver.

            “Damn it,” she whispered.  She had recovered from her death; why hadn’t he?  “Quentin, you simply must –”

            Which was, of course, the moment the doors opened.

            “Miss Harridge!” Tad Collins, fourteen, wide-eyed, innocent, cried.  “Father!  You’ve come back!”

            “We have,” Daphne said brusquely.  Seizing Quentin’s arm, she swept past her new stepson and into the Collinwood foyer.  The lights, she decided, were too bright.  They hurt her preternatural eyes; at her side, Quentin was whimpering and struggling in her grip, trying to shield his own eyes.

            “Where have you been?” Tad whined.  “Miss Harridge, such things have happened here tonight!  Did you know that Nicholas Blair is a wizard?  They’ve come for him, the people of the town, and they set up a stake and a pyre on the beach and they burned him there!  I watched it all!  No one,” he said, suddenly quietly, “no one even tried to stop me.”

            “Tad,” Daphne said severely, “your father has had a great shock.  No,” she said swiftly, and forced Quentin’s head back down as he tried to look up, “no, you must leave him alone.  He needs to sleep.  I will care for him.”

 

            “You?” Tad said blankly.  “But …  but you’re my governess!”

            “Not any longer,” Daphne said grandly, and lifted her chin.  She smiled coldly.  “I am your new mother.  We are married.”

            “This is impossible!” Daniel Collins roared from the top of the staircase.  Two heads swiveled to look up at him; Quentin continued to stare blankly at the carpet.  The old man began to descend the stairs, but slowly, painfully, and his face was a thundercloud.  “Impossible,” he said, panting as he descended, “he cannot marry you.  He is already married.”

            “Where is my mother?” Tad whispered.

            “Tad,” Daphne said sharply, “go to your room.”

           

            The boy hesitated.  “But I –”

            Daphne fixed him with her eyes.  They grew as silver as Quentin’s as they pinned the child like a snake.  Daphne, dead longer than Quentin, had already begun to experiment with her newly developed powers, even before she met Leticia in the woods; now, she thought, now I can play.  “I told you to go to your room,” she said slowly, deliberately.

            Tad nodded slowly.  His mouth gaped.  “I will obey,” he whispered. 

            “Good boy,” she purred, and patted him on the shoulder. 

           

            “You are zuvembi,” Stiles had told her, the first thing she remembered upon … waking up?  That wasn’t the proper term.  He killed me, she thought now, and unbeknownst to her, her eyes flashed silver again.  He took my heart; and the human Daphne, who had lived a more-or-less ordinary kind of life in the village right up until the moment she was hired to be Tad Collins’ governess in the big house, that Daphne would have quailed and wept and fled the room, gasping and panting in some locked room until she dissolved utterly into tears.  Zuvembi Daphne, however, looked upon her former self with something even worse than contempt:  a black kind of hatred that burned inside her.  Where my heart should be, she supposed. 

 

            “With your new life comes a startling array of powers,” Stiles had promised her, then kissed her softly upon her dead lips.  “And you will use them all.  At my command, of course,” but – of course – Stiles wasn’t going to be ordering anyone around anytime soon. 

            You will be the bride of Quentin Collins.  You will bring him over to our side.  You will become the mistress of Collinwood, and you will cause it to become a sanctuary for the time when I hold the power of Judah Zachery … when I shall unleash hell on earth.

            He had actually said those things to her.

            And, if she’d been capable of ordinary human thought, it might have occurred to her now that she continued to actively follow Gerard’s plans to the letter.

            But now:  she needed to be careful; if she gazed too deeply into her stepson’s eyes, the power of the zuvembi would overtake him, and she would have his soul.  That was a useful trick, but one she decided now to save for a more valuable time.  “Go darling,” she said, and placed her cold lips upon Tad’s forehead.  His eyes rolled back in his head and he shuddered, though with disgust or pleasure, she couldn’t tell.  Didn’t matter.  He was already mounting the staircase, unsteadily, weaving a bit, a fact which wasn’t lost on Daniel, rheumy eyes or not.

            The old man was already thundering down the staircase.  “Quentin, are you mad?” he roared.  They kept him in the tower room; Daphne had discovered that soon after her employ with the Collins began.  He killed his first wife, one Harriet Collins, on a stormy night twenty years ago, strangled her and then threw her corpse from the top of Widow’s Hill, a fact which remained deeply buried … until he tried the same trick with his latest wife, the pretty dishmop Valerie Collins.  They hid the scandal from the rest of the world, as the Collins family was wont to do, and while Daniel remained the nominal head of the family, of course it was Quentin who ran the estate and the fishing fleet below the hill.  But Daniel was also known to escape from time to time; Stella Young, who acted as secretary to Quentin, disappeared a year or so ago, and it hadn’t taken long for Daphne to learn that her disappearance coincided with one of Daniel’s many escapes.

            So perhaps, Daphne thought, chewing on the tip of one fingernail (and she didn’t notice how it magically regenerated even as she gnawed at it; such was the power of the zuvembi), it might behoove me to keep just a bit of space between me and the old man.

            “Quentin, look at me when I talk to you,” Daniel growled.  He had reached the base of the staircase, and Quentin, as ordered, continued to look steadfastly away from the man who had been his father.  The Dark One is his father now, Daphne thought, thrilled, and hid her grin with the back of her hand.   But Daniel, his eyes a bit more eagle than Daphne originally figured, narrowed, and he snarled, “I don’t see what is so amusing about this, Miss Harridge.”

 

            “Mrs. Collins,” Daphne said, dropping her hand.  “We are married, Mr. Collins.  Daniel.”  She smirked.  “Father.  It is a fact, and you cannot change it.”

            “I can have your marriage annulled,” Daniel growled.  “This is … this is some kind of nightmare!  Samantha has been dead for less than a night, and already you,” and he swept his basilisk gaze back to his son, shaggy head obediently lowered, “you are cavorting with this … this …”

            “Governess,” Daphne supplied helpfully.

            You are zuvembi.  You can call the dead back from their graves.

            Well, Daphne thought suddenly, wouldn’t that be a fun trick to try out.

            “Mr. Collins,” she said in a low voice, “you would be wise to let us retire to our bedroom now.”

            Daniel’s face grew an unhealthy magenta color, and he managed to choke, “Your –!”

            “Yes,” Daphne hissed, “ours, Quentin’s and mine.  He is my husband.  I am his wife.  Samantha is dead; the coroner will report a heart attack –”

            Daniel gaped at her.  “How do you know what the coroner will –”

           

            Her smile grew more poisonous.  “The coroner will report a heart attack, and no court on this earth will stand in my way.  I am Mrs. Quentin Collins.  And if you continued to interefere–”

            “How dare you speak to me this way,” Daniel choked.  “You – you harlot –”

            “Let the spirit of dark night take possession of this room!” Daphne cried, whirling away from the old man and throwing out her arms.  Instantly the room was plunged into blackness; only an eerie greenish-blue light, which flickered into existence around her hands, allowed them to see. 

            “Quentin!” Daniel cried, clutching his son’s arm, “Quentin, you must save me!  You must –”  But Daniel’s words broke off with a scream, for Quentin had lifted his head at last, and his eyes glowed an unholy silver, and he grinned, and Daniel saw how his teeth were stained black with blood –

            “Release a spirit from her watery grave,” Daphne intoned; the words flowed from her lips, and she didn’t question them.  I am zuvembi, she thought proudly.  “Let him look upon her face!  Show him the misery he has caused; show him the tears that rotted in her eyes!”

            Light flared in the far corner of the room, near the servants’ entrance, and the form of a woman took shape within the shadows that capered there.  Daniel, who recognized her immediately, blanched.  “No!” he whimpered.  “No!  Send her away!  I don’t want to see her!  I don’t want to see her!”

 

            But the ghost in the corner was relentless.  She came creeping from the shadows, her elbows and knees bent at strange and impossible angles, making each movement quick and crab-like, her head cocked like a mongrel dog; she was white as salt, and her hair hung lank over her glaring, unblinking eyes.  Seaweed  dangled from her shoulders and her fingertips, reaching, reaching, reaching for her husband …

            “Spirit of Harriet Collins,” Daphne said, grinning, “here is your murderer!  He is yours; take him, take him back to the sea!  Make him scream, the way you screamed the night he murdered you on Widow’s Hill!”

            “Harriet,” Daniel blubbered, and covered his face with his hands, “oh Harriet, no, no, no, please, no –” but the ghost was relentless, and came creeping, creeping –

            “Take him!” Daphne shrieked in an ecstasy of hatred.  “Take him away with you!  Devour him there on the edge of the cliff; drain him; drink him completely!  He is yours – yours – yours to –”

            But the explosion of the rifle cut off whatever else the undead woman might have commanded her puppet; its discharge tore through the shade of Harriet Collins, who winked out like a candle flame, and then through the forehead of Daphne Collins, nee Harridge.  The top of her skull, from the nose to her crown, disintegrated; her mouth gaped open and her tongue, gray and wormlike, flopped out and dangled for a moment before her entire body shuddered, dropped to its knees, then fell forward.  Behind the place where Daphne had made her last stand, the wallpaper beside the portrait of Barnabas Collins was sprayed with a black and red stains and flecked with tiny white bits of bone and gray streaks of what had been, once upon a few seconds ago, Daphne’s brains. 

            Quentin turned his head dreamily, his face unreactive, in the direction of the drawing room.

            “Oh my god,” Daniel babbled, “oh my god, oh thank god, oh thank Jesus, sweet sweet Jesus –”

            

             Gabriel Collins held the rifle in his lap; a beatific smile crossed his features, and he nodded.  “Yes Father,” he said.  “You might well call upon the Savior now.  He has released us from the curse of yet another of Satan’s night beasts.  He has delivered us, and I am His instrument.”  He grinned, and cocked the rifle, ejecting a shell onto the carpet.  The smell of gunpowder filled the foyer.  “Me,” he said, “and this.”  He began to reload.

           

            “Gabriel,” Daniel cried, “something … something is terribly wrong with your brother!  He’s … he’s under a spell; he …”

            “He is a warlock,” Gabriel said, and spat.  “He sits at the right hand of Lucifer.”  Gabriel lifted the rifle and took aim.

            “NO!” Daniel shrieked.

            The explosion took Quentin in the chest.  He didn’t move; didn’t fall backward; merely grunted, then looked down at the large black hole above his stomach.  He lifted his head and glared at Gabriel; his silver eyes flashed, and he held his hands out, grasping in his brother’s direction.

            But Gabriel had already reloaded.  For a moment, something like pity flickered in his

eyes.   He aimed the gun between his eyes.  “Quentin,” he murmured, but no one heard him.  “Brother.”

 

            Quentin grunted.

            And Gabriel fired.

            Quentin’s corpse, now merely a corpse again, dropped to the floor beside Daphne’s sprawled body.

            Daniel wailed.

            “It had to be done, Father,” Gabriel said, but his voice was suddenly unsteady.  “He was a monster.  Something inhuman.  He hasn’t been human for a long while, I believe.”

            “You believe,” Daniel sobbed, then suddenly, startling, reached out and slapped Gabriel across the face.  “You bastard,” he snarled.  “It should have been you, it should have been you, it should be you lying there –”  And he turned away and knelt at Quentin’s side, lifted his hand and wept his tears against it, and sobbed, “Quentin, oh … oh Quentin –”

            “Father!” Gabriel called.  His voice cracked, warped into a glissade of pain.  “Father!  Please!  Father!”

            In the end, it was Ben Stokes again, as it was always Ben Stokes it seemed, who patted Gabriel’s shoulder, said, “I’ll take Mr. Dan’l back to his room; I’ll remove the bodies; I’ll bury them in the woods, and no one will ever know … we’ll tell everyone they tried to sail to England, that their ship went down … no one will ever know … the secret will be safe … the family will be safe … always …”

            Gabriel sat in his chair before the fireplace now, glaring into the flames, his fingers steepled.  It was nearly dawn.  Tad would have to be told the tidy fiction Ben composed, Gabriel told himself, that his father and his governess had left Collinwood immediately for a honeymoon trip; after enough time, they would spread the word that the ship went down.  And Tad will take control of the house and the fortunes, Gabriel thought darkly, and peeled his teeth back in a dog-like grimace.  What about my boys?  What about Caleb and Gregory?  It wasn’t fair; he thought of his father keening over Quentin’s destroyed body; dammit, it wasn’t fair. 

 

            “No, my darling,” a voice said from behind him, and he stiffened, dug his fingers into the wood arms of his chair; his eyes widened and his mouth gaped and worked, spilling out soundless words, because it wasn’t possible what he was hearing, not possible at all.

            But the cool hands that reached out from behind him before he could turn around, those soft fingers that stroked his cheek once, hands he had loved once upon a time, those hands filled with a sudden and inexplicable strength he knew they had never before possessed; those hands that gripped his chin and crown; those hands that twisted suddenly, viciously to the right so that the crack of his neck as it broke came, so satisfying; those hands that belonged to his dearly departed wife, Edith Collins, were now being wiped delicately on the front of her dress.

            She came around the front of the chair now and peered curiously at Gabriel’s head, canted now at an impossible angle.  His frozen blue eyes stared furiously at nothing.

            “It isn’t fair, is it,” she said.  “Not even a little bit.”

            And began to laugh.

 

TO BE CONTINUED ...