DISCLAIMER: Dark Shadows and its canon characters are the property of Dan Curtis Productions; no copyright infringement is intended.
Note: This fic, suggested by a film I loved in my youth, has a beginning and end...but, unfortunately, no middle. I may or may not remedy that at a future date. For now, please read all three "Chapters"!
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Elizabeth paced up and down in the ill-lit foyer of Collinwood, her patience wearing thinner by the minute. The family had left as requested, not daring to ask for an explanation. But she still felt embarrassed and, yes, afraid. The one saving grace of this business was that her enemies would be unable to figure out the point of it. Damned if she herself could...
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Barnabas Collins moaned and leaned back in his chair. Victoria's chair, the one she'd occupied when she was snatched out of the year 1991 and flung into the past. He'd been sitting there for hours - straining to contact her, perhaps even join her in 1790 through sheer force of will.
Nothing, nothing.
This is useless. You're useless.
No! Rest. Gather strength, try again.
He gasped at a touch on his shoulder. "Barnabas - are you all right?"
He steadied himself and looked up into the drawn face of his distant cousin, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. He felt a pang of guilt.
"I'm all right, Elizabeth." If she only knew. "I just have to keep trying. At night, because that's when it happened, when she was taken. Does it frighten you to have me sitting here in the middle of the night?"
"Yes, but I'm mostly afraid for you. Opening your mind to - whatever is out there." Her hand lingered on his shoulder, and he thought of his gentle mother, so like her. "Can I do anything to help?"
"No. There was a...bond...between Victoria and me. If anyone can reach her, I can."
Face it, you fool! Victoria is gone, absorbed into Josette, to die on that hellish night at Widows' Hill. And if you find other incarnations of Josette, the same thing will happen again and again, till the end of time.
He managed a wan smile. "Go up to bed. I'm a night person. There's no need for anyone else to lose sleep."
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His smile faded with Elizabeth's footsteps. The atmosphere of the gloomy mansion descended on him like a pall.
Collinwood. The house he'd heard of, dreamt of all his life, but never entered as a normal, living man. The place that was to have been so special - foul and contaminated now, like everything he touched.
Strange, how one small decision could affect countless lives. He'd begged his father to let him go to England, to supervise the careful dismantling of their ancestral home and its shipment to America. But Joshua had refused. Why? To keep Barnabas from seeing the "old country" he loved? Was it payback, because the boy had shared his mother's vaguely pro-British sentiments during the Revolution? Whatever his reasons, Joshua had insisted the family solicitors could handle things in England, and Barnabas was needed in Martinique.
He wondered, not for the first time, if his father had later invented that tale of his having settled in England as a form of atonement.
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The last rattle of carriage wheels died away on the moor. Elizabeth turned and strode into the inner room.
"They're gone. To spend the night, no doubt, speculating that their Queen is a witch. Or at least, consorts with a warlock." She glared at John Dee, who seemed to be dividing his attention between a crystal ball - in which she saw nothing - and an unusually complex astrological chart.
"On that point, Madam, they would not be far wrong," he replied mildly. "But the Collins family - in every generation - has occult secrets of its own to protect. They can be trusted not to draw attention to themselves by spreading scandals. And besides, the shipbuilding contract Your Majesty gave old Mordecai should be enough to seal anyone's lips."
"We need ships. We'll surely need more after we engage Philip's Armada." She gazed narrowly at him. "And we need the counsel of our greatest admiral, Tom Seymour."
Who was also the only man she had ever loved.
"Ah, yes. Your Majesty's...admiral."
"Hang it, Dee!" She banged her fist on the table, and took fleeting satisfaction in seeing him jump. "Tell me why you insisted we come here! I've tried to summon the ghost of Tom Seymour in the Tower, in Chelsea - even at Hatfield, where we first met. Why here? To the best of my knowledge, Tom never set foot in this house, or even this part of England!"
"Your Majesty is quite correct. He did not."
"Then why -?"
He looked up from the chart at last, and fixed her with a piercing gaze. "Because I am hoping to give Your Majesty a living Tom Seymour. Unless, of course, you have your heart set on a dead one."
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Elizabeth sat in stunned silence for five minutes, watching Dee putter with the chart. Then she found her voice.
"What manner of black magic is this?"
"White magic, Madam, white."
"White magic, then. How think you to bring back a man who's been dead nigh on forty years?"
Dee pondered the question, weighing his words. Then he said, "May I ask Your Majesty's views concerning the afterlife? What do you believe happens to us after death?"
It was her turn to hesitate. Frowning, she said, "Whatever churchmen claim, I know the dead can return as ghosts. I've never seen one, but I have heard testimony I must believe."
"Very true. We may linger for a time as ghosts. Then what?"
Another frown. "Heaven or hell, I suppose."
"Your Majesty sounds dubious."
"I am. I've known many mortals, but nary a one of them a saint. And precious few, sinners deserving of damnation. Life is a struggle. Most of us, in getting through it, do the harm we do unwittingly."
Like herself. She'd fallen in love with Tom and thrown herself at him. Tom...her half-brother's maternal uncle, her stepmother's second husband and widower. Tom had seen the teenaged Elizabeth as a child until she forced him to take another look. And because of Court intrigues she'd been too young to understand, their love had cost him his life. Did she deserve to burn? Surely Tom did not.
"Purgatory?" Dee suggested.
"Mayhap..." That idea disturbed her. "It seems a waste that souls should spend - centuries? - useless, in a kind of gaol."
"Mayhap they do not. Where might purgatory be, Madam?"
"Where?"
"From time immemorial, men have conceived of heaven as being up and hell down. So where might purgatory be? Where is left?"
His meaning slowly dawned on her. "In between. Here."
Dee nodded. "Our souls live again, Madam, in new bodies. To wage new battles, learn new lessons. We all have many lives, many loves. Your Majesty has existed from the beginning of time - as have I. And the entity Your Majesty knew as Tom Seymour."
"You realize this is heresy."
"It is heresy. It is also the truth."
She turned it over in her mind, then nodded slowly. "I've heard this notion before, suspected it myself. You seem to speak with certainty. And I know you have strange sources of information, John Dee.
"So I'll grant you that the dead live again, in new bodies. What has that to do with the matter at hand? If you'd planned to tell me some ten- or twenty-year-old Collins is Tom Seymour, you would not have sent him away."
"I would not. The situation is not that simple.
"There are patterns in rebirth, patterns that were understood by the seers of old. For example, the signs in the natal chart rotate clockwise, one House, from life to life. A few very skilled astrologers, knowing all the details of a chart, can look backward - and forward - in time. See the person as he was in the long-ago, and as he one day will be."
Dee's voice had dropped to a whisper. His eyes gleamed. Elizabeth stared, mesmerized, as he reached out to touch his crystal ball. "A very few astrologers can use other tools, see more. Learn all, all..."
He broke off. "Well. Unfortunately, in this case, not quite all. But I believe I know enough."
"You've obviously studied strange...mysteries, techniques, these last years on the Continent." For a moment, Elizabeth felt fear. Then it was gone - removed? - and she knew this was the same old friend who'd helped her select the date for her Coronation, thirty years before.
"Aye, Madam. And with Your Majesty's approval, I intend to use them to bring back the naval advisor you need. The man you love.
"Far in the future, there exists a man named Barnabas Collins - a member of this family. Barnabas Collins is the reincarnation of Tom Seymour. He does not consciously remember that life, or his relationship with you. But those memories could be reawakened. He's desperately unhappy in his own world. He believes - whether correctly or not, I cannot say - that he's lost the woman he loved in that time, beyond any hope of getting her back. He feels useless, and worse than useless - a source of grief and danger to everyone who cares for him.
"Barnabas Collins is sitting in this room, alone, with his mind deliberately opened to influences from the past, on a spring night in 1991..."
"And you can bring him here?"
"Almost certainly, yes. But before I attempt it, there are two things Your Majesty must know. Details that may cause problems.
"First, he is in this room. But in 1991, the room is not in this country! Collinwood has been relocated - carefully reconstructed, from original materials - in the New World. Which proves, by the way, that Your Majesty's colony will fare better in future than it has to date.
"The second matter is more alarming. I mentioned a living Tom Seymour. But Barnabas Collins is not exactly living..."
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At the conclusion of Dee's tale, the Queen buried her face in her hands for a long moment. When she looked up, her eyes burned into him.
Her voice trembled with rage. "You want to let this happen? Why? To assure that he'll be miserable in the eighteenth century, and the twentieth? I will not have it! You can spare him, pluck him out of his own time before he becomes a vampire. Before he meets Josette DuPres, or after - I care not. Bring her with him. If he is truly Tom Seymour, I can win him back from any other woman!"
"I doubt not that you could, Madam." Dee repressed a smile. Seymour had been executed at forty-one, when Elizabeth was sixteen. Now she was fifty-five. He had told her Barnabas Collins would be, to all intents and purposes, thirty-five. But far from worrying over how she might appear to him, she wanted him even younger - with Josette DuPres in tow! Only Elizabeth.
"Unfortunately, what Your Majesty wishes is impossible. I can only bring him back to sixteenth-century England from within Collinwood. Barnabas Collins was born in the New World. The house was rebuilt there during his lifetime. But he was traveling on business, then preoccupied with family crises. He never set foot in Collinwood until after he'd become a vampire. Given that fact, our best opportunity is the night I spoke of, in 1991.
"However, once we have him, there is hope. Hear me out..."
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Fifteen minutes later, Elizabeth nodded slowly. "All right. But before we begin, I have one more question. Will this Barnabas Collins look like Tom Seymour?"
"I think so. Hope so. But I said I don't know everything about him. I know intimate details of his life, but I've never seen his face.
"The degree of physical resemblance depends on how closely the two lives are linked. But in the end, it may not matter." He gave her a questioning look.
Elizabeth met his gaze squarely. "You needn't worry. Whatever he looks like, it will make no difference to me."
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Suddenly, the darkness around Barnabas was thickening. Closing in on him. He tried instinctively to rise from the chair and fell back, overcome by dizziness.
Dizziness?
The room spun crazily; a ringing began in his ears and grew to a roar. He was unable to breathe. His pounding heart seemed about to burst from his chest.
Oh God, please let it stop!
And then it was over.
He seemed still to be seated in the same or a very similar chair. He inhaled cautiously, exhaled. As his vision began to clear, faces swam into view...a man and woman, watching him warily. Their expressions unreadable, but definitely not surprise or fear. The flickering light of candles cast eerie shadows on the wall.
Barnabas took a deep breath. Think. The dimensions of the room seemed unchanged. So he was probably still in the drawing room of Collinwood, in another time. 1790? No, the furnishings were wrong. They should have been those he remembered from the Manor House, newly moved. And not the nineteenth century - he still had scant knowledge of that era, but he had seen enough family portraits and photographs to be sure these clothing styles were wrong.
An earlier period, then... Sudden shock, as he reeled at the implications. Well, Barnabas, you always wanted to visit England!
He took a closer look at his hosts, through half-lidded eyes. Had they been attempting to summon a demon? If so, they would be sadly disappointed.
The man, a sixtyish graybeard. Something vaguely familiar about him. The woman...
Ah, the woman. An ageless beauty, red-gold hair gone gray at the temples. Facially, she bore a striking resemblance to Elizabeth, and to his mother. But without her having spoken a word, he sensed this woman was different. Proud, confident, forceful - God, he was already thinking of her blood! Warm and rich, he could almost taste it! A strong, regal woman...
And suddenly, he knew. He'd seen portraits of this woman - wondered, now, at his never having noticed that his mother resembled her. Queen Elizabeth. The greatest monarch in British history. And he had thought of - thought of -! Something in the pit of his stomach turned to ice.
"Master Collins?" the graybeard was saying, carefully polite. "Barnabas Collins? Are you all right, sir?" So they had known of his existence, brought him here deliberately! That surprised him more than anything else.
"I'm all right, Master - Dee." Where had that come from? He had heard of John Dee, the foremost astrologer of the Elizabethan age. But how had he connected that name with this face and voice?
Still experiencing a detached surprise at his own behavior, he rose gracefully and executed a deep, formal bow. "Your Majesty."
"Pleased to meet you, Master Collins. Do sit down, be comfortable. Ah...you are most perceptive. 'Tis well we had no thought of concealing our identities, eh, John?"
The Queen sounded good-humored, mildly amused. But when Barnabas looked up into her sea-green eyes, he read barely contained excitement.
"Master Dee." He retreated to the chair, conscious of unwanted stirrings within himself. "Whatever you're attempting, I trust you realize you're dealing with...dark forces. I hope you've woven protective spells around yourself and, especially, the Queen." Would Dee understand that? Or could the man possibly not know what he was?
"No spells, Master Collins. And yes. We know."