9

Kate Winslet voice-over: "History has been changed, and the past has been altered. The modern day Collins family is now reliving an altered version of history. Amanda Collins has been granted the power of Angelique as a witch and has used the power bequeathed to her to remold history to her making. She has succeeded in making William her husband and a pariah of the family, but she may soon discover that realizing your true dreams can be the worst nightmare of all."

Amanda had turned William into a badgered husband who couldn't think for himself. Every time Angelique tried to get near him, Amanda ran interference and kept them apart. Unable to deal with the screaming at the Old House, the disinherited former heir to the estate fled to the main house to get his belongings, but the screaming started up again. Sara Elizabeth and David tried to defend William, but Naomi recalled another time and another young heir who had lost his true love and had married beneath his station. Receiving the best wishes of the family matriarch, William and Amanda stole away into the night to make the British frigate Whistler for London, but missing the ship because of the arguments at the estate, they headed to the inn to await the next possible ship. Nervous and agitated, William booked himself and Amanda as Mr. and Mrs. Collins and took a small room on the top floor. Fire-haired Amanda was giddy and excited to be getting away from her parents, but William was nervous and stressed. The Collins name had helped him his entire life, and now he had to start over without it. Lighting the fire in his room, he rose distractedly as Amanda came to him in her nightdress. Her new husband flashed a nervous smile.

"I will be a very good wife to you." Amanda's spirits alighted to be in his arms. "I have waited forever to be in your arms… to feel the touch of your embrace."

"I know…" William caressed her cheek. "We'll catch the morning ship to Halifax and catch up with the Whistler for London." He grinned to see her child-like features study him so closely. "We'll go to Paris, Berlin, Rome, Athens… We'll see it all and much more." She tingled at his touch and tilted her head sideways as his lips came close to hers. "I will always love you." Holding her close to his heart, William kissed her and felt her lips caress his face. As he was holding her, voices from the past came to haunt him.
"Oh, man, Amanda's following us again." He was a boy with his cousins running loose on the estate in the Seventies.

"Amanda is creeping me out again!" He was eight years old at the family dinner table as Amanda sat across from him for Thanksgiving dinner in 1982.

"It's Amanda again!" He was in his old tree house in 1975 with Jamison and J.R. along with Russell Coleman and Joe Haskell Junior and looking down to her looking up to him in the tree. The images came fast and quick. He stepped away from his new wife.

"William, darling, are you okay?" Amanda was distressed to see him stagger around nearly falling over. William braced on the bed post momentarily and stood at the writing desk. What was going on? What were these memories? Trying to compose himself at the bureau, he felt as if he was being held on trial. He had been in a courtroom once.

"So let me get this straight…" Judge Harry T. Stone of the Manhattan Criminal Court looked down to William. "You're a paranormal researcher and you look for ghosts."

"Pretty much…" William echoed in his first arraignment with the Collinsport Ghost Society. The memories of another life were rushing to him, but that was not his first encounter with Harry. He had met Harry while hustling pool as a teenager in a Boston pub called Cheers during the summer of 1989.

"Choke on that, Stone."

"Oh, we'll see about that." In the bar, Harry was known as Harry The Hat, a mischievous scoundrel who pretended to grift scams on bar owner Sam Malone and the locals. Cliff and Norm often cast bets on him. Reeling from these strange memories, William looked at Amanda confused. Why was he experiencing these visions? Were they real? How many times did Brian and Joe Hackett fly him to Boston?

"So…" William grinned toward Helen Chapel, the attractive lunch counter owner at Sandpiper Airport on Nantucket in another vision. "Do you know any attractive young ladies who might show me around the island?"

"I can only be gone thirty minutes!" Helen climbed over the counter hoping to attract the interest of the young writer and heir. It was a vague memory. Helen was only interested in making Joe jealous; he was the man she'd eventually marry. It was the echoes of another life, another time and they were rushing back to William like forgotten memories. Amanda wasn't sure what was going on. She guided William over to the bed and sat him down on it. Trapped in those images, William found himself back in summer camp. It was early June 1980, and he was making the friends that would last him a lifetime.

"I'm Seeley…" The other kid had the bunk over his head. "Seeley Booth."

"Did you know you're named after my mother's suitcase?"

Amanda slid off the bed as William sat up suddenly. She didn't know what was happening, but she wasn't losing him. She jumped to her feet and reached to hold him. She looked into his eyes.

"William, what's happening?!" She embraced him.

"I don't know…" He looked distraught and scared to her. "Amanda, this all…." He looked around the room. "This all feels fake." He saw his reflection in the mirror and barely recognized himself. "Where did I get long hair?"

"Oh, God…" Amanda realized the scary truth his memory of his real life was coming back. Was it the kiss? Were the spells she had cast wearing off? His actual feelings about her must have been stronger than any fake feelings he had for her. She tried pulling him closer to her. "William, just tell me you love me! Just tell me!"

"Amanda, what's wrong with…." He heard voices in the room and spun around to meet Richard Fish, an associate from his past introducing him to the woman he wanted to marry, but in this vision, Ally was a career woman of the 1990s in a short skirt and business jacket. He gazed upon her childlike features, her round brown eyes and knew immediately he was in love. Unlike the other girls of his past his mother tried to set him up with, this one was real; she was the woman he wanted to marry and share his life. He looked at Amanda and immediately recognized her as the crazy cousin that made him feel weird. She slipped drugs in the drinks of his dates to make them sick and lied to him to get him to get taken to the movies and out to dinner. Everything was coming back now. She stared at him scared to death.

"I gotta go." He quickly announced.

"Go?" Amanda was confused. "But we just got married!" She watched as he opened the door to the room and rushed from the room. "William! Get back here! I am your wife!" She screamed at him to return, but William wouldn't hear of it. Was he time traveling again? In another vision he was in the driver's seat of a modified and computerized 1987 Trans Am with the incorporated circuitry from the technology used to find black holes in space. NASA scientist Nicolas Talbot had experimented with the technology based on designs by Professor Emmett Brown, but it was William who discovered the technology allowed him to travel back in time to 1961 where his Aunt Carolyn tried to seduce him. He saw himself speeding toward exploding white light in that vision. In another he was in a college dorm room at Northwest Maine University.

"I'm Ben Gates." His college roommates met him. "That's Ian Malcolm."

"Hey…" Ian waved hello. "Are you really a Collins? Are you really friends with John Kennedy Jr.?"

"Well, we don't go out trolling for chicks…."

Rushing through the downstairs tavern of the Collinsport Inn, William realized his returning memories were almost complete. The shade over his eyes had been lifted and now he finally realized his life was a lie. His name was William Benjamin Collins; he was the son of Barnabas and Angelique Collins, born September 9, 1971. He was a writer and author. He had even been a horror movie consultant in Hollywood and had met Britney Spears, James Cameron and Tom Cruise; he had done things that were not possible in 1820, so the question was: how did he get here and how would he get home? He sure needed Professor Talbot's modified Trans Am now. Turning around looking upon his hometown alight with kerosene street lamps and streets tainted by the feces of horses pulling carts, he tried to get his bearings. He was outside the Collinsport Inn. His Aunt Maggie would work here during the Sixties while talking care of her father, but that was a hundred and fifty years away. The old courthouse was down the street. It would become the Historical Society in 1970. It was also right on the edge of Eagle Hill Cemetery, which bordered Collins Road on the other side. That was the direct path back to Collinwood. Looking for answers, he waited for the horse and wagon to past and hurried toward the old courthouse, following the same path he had taken in his youth for town, but now there were fewer houses, more trees and somehow, the seventeen acres of cemetery in the cemetery seemed far more spooky. Once he left town, he left the lights behind and vanished into sheer darkness.

First laid out by Isaac Collins and Benjamin Drew in the 1690s, the cemetery covered rolling hills and former woodland, but in 1820, William found less of his regular landmarks and had more trees to block his view of the light on the lighthouse. He found the Collins Mausoleum where Joshua Collins rested, but beyond that, he found the unfinished stonewall that once marked the perimeter resting in the middle of a grove of trees. Perhaps this was a bad mistake. Maybe he should have found his way back to town and followed Main Street out of town to the bridge and followed the creek to behind the Old House. Out the corner of his eye, he saw a figure.

"Hello!" He called out to the darkness. It looked like the figure of a woman in white. Whether she was a ghost or not, he didn't care, but she seemed to know where she was going. She was going deeper and deeper into the woods, following a worn fishing path for the cliffs. Dodging branches he couldn't see, dark brush that blocked his way and the detritus of fallen trees around him, the young heir kept following her. Stepping forward, he reached open air and stumbled off the back of the cemetery. His shoulder hit the ground first followed by his right hip and then his back before he rolled the final ten feet to the bottom. The landing was soft dirt and a mulch of dead leaves. That told him he was somewhere near what would be Seaview Drive beyond Rose Cottage. Groaning in the dark, William looked up to the starry dark blue blanket of stars over his head then noticed the figure he'd been following.

"Lizzie? Is that you?" He gasped. She looked like his cousin. Crowned by a head of wild blonde hair, she had large blue eyes and a very bosomy figure. Sort of petite, she stood staring at him quietly.

"I think I hurt my back in the fall." William reached to her in the dark. "Can you help me back to Collinwood?" She reached seemingly trying to help him but pushed him back to the ground. William groaned from the pain and looked again. Her knee to his chest, her hands caressed his shoulders. William got a closer look at her as her face came close to his. Her eyes were completely black. Fighting to push her off, William struggled to free himself of her demonic embrace as her head reared back, and her teeth drove deep into his throat.