In Darkness
A Dark Shadows 1970/1840 Fanfiction
Chapter Ten
How are we going to go on? Willie Loomis asked himself.
What's the point of going on now, with Barnabas gone?
It felt like an insult for the sun to be shining in the parlor of the Old House, when Barnabas wouldn't be here again. Willie wanted to yell at the sun not to shine on the things that Barnabas loved. He wanted to yank the curtains closed, but he knew it wouldn't help. Even if he didn't see the sun sparkling on everything, he knew he would hurt just as bad.
He looked around at the many things he'd taught himself to repair and clean, to make the house the way Barnabas wanted it. He looked at the spindly-legged old dining room chairs that he'd put back together and then cleaned and refinished. He looked up at the chandelier with all its crystals that he'd spent so danged many hours washing and then re-attaching to each other. He looked over at the fireplace mantel with all its crazy nooks and crannies, which he had cleaned of their dirt and spider webs with what seemed like an endless succession of toothbrushes.
Now I'm wondering why I bothered, Willie thought. Now I'm wondering what was the point of any of it. Now it feels like all the work I did around this place was wasted.
Because all that work was for Barnabas, and Barnabas is dead.
He wasn't sure if it made him feel better or worse to know he wasn't alone in all of this. Better, he guessed. At least maybe when he was trying to help Julia, he wasn't thinking so much about how bad he hurt. He looked over at Julia now, sitting in one of the chairs by the fireplace—the chair that wasn't Barnabas' favorite. He guessed Julia would never sit in that chair again, any more than he would sit in it. If Julia and Willie had any say in it, nobody would sit in that chair again.
The idea came to Willie that Julia's face looked the same as this room did without Barnabas. Julia and the room were as bleak and empty as each other. As he looked at her, another thought along those same lines struck him. She reminded him of an empty cicada casing. He thought of how weird those casings were; how they almost looked like they hadn't changed from when there was a bug alive inside them, but now they were all dried up and just waiting to blow away in the first good puff of wind.
He walked over closer to Julia and saw that her cup on the little table beside her chair was empty again. Willie said, "I'll go make some more tea."
Julia's eyes sparked. She snapped angrily, "Don't bother, Willie, it won't do any good. Do you think tea is going to bring him back?"
Willie didn't bother getting angry back at her, since he knew too damn well why she was talking like that. He just said, "Okay, Julia. Forget I said it."
She clearly felt sorry immediately, and she smiled heartbreakingly up at him. "No," she said, "forget I said it. I'm not angry at you. This isn't your fault."
"Isn't it?" Willie muttered. "Are you sure it isn't?"
Now she sat up straighter in her chair and frowned at him intensely. "Yes, Willie, I am sure," she answered. "None of it is your fault." Sighing a little and sitting back again, she murmured, "Maybe more than anyone else, it's my fault and it is Barnabas'. We knew all the clues to what was coming and we didn't manage to stop it. But I do know it isn't your fault. You did everything you could."
Yeah? Willie thought. I ain't so sure about that. But aloud he told her, "So did you, Julia. So did you and Barnabas both." He said that firmly, even though it hurt to say Barnabas' name.
Julia could tell him all she wanted about how it wasn't his fault, but Willie felt nowhere near convinced that was true.
He thought, All I had was one job, to keep watch on that girl Daphne and stop her from getting away to do any magical mumbo-jumbo. That's what I had to do, and that's what I failed at. All I did was sit there last night when the ghost popped up and Daphne strolled away with him.
Suddenly Willie shivered. He told himself, Okay. Maybe you don't need to make too big a deal about how it's your fault. Do you really think you could have done anything to fight that ghost?
For months, ever since she and Barnabas came home from Parallel Time and 1995, Julia had been talking about how evil that ghost was. She'd tried, over and over, to explain to Willie what it felt like to be inside Collinwood in 1995, when that ghost, Gerard—or whatever they were supposed to call him now—controlled it. She'd tried to explain to him how it felt when the ghost was controlling her. She'd struggled to find some way of making him understand what it felt like to be face-to-face with that much evil.
He guessed nobody really could understand, who hadn't felt it himself. Now he had felt it—just an edge of it—when the ghost appeared last night and stared at him. Now Willie felt cold and sick, just from remembering the look in that ghost's eyes.
He didn't think he had ever seen anything that bad. That look seemed to speak disgust and scorn for Willie Loomis and for everything else alive. Remembering that look made Willie think that even the worst times with Barnabas—even at the very beginning, back when Barnabas was strangling him and biting him and beating him, and draining his willpower along with his blood—even all of that hadn't been as terrifying as looking in the eyes of that warlock's ghost.
The worst times with Barnabas hadn't been as bad as seeing that ghost's eyes, because somehow Willie had always understood that Barnabas was still human. Or at least, he understood it when he looked back on those times now. When Barnabas did all those things to him, it was because Barnabas himself was hurt and afraid. Barnabas felt all the things that human beings feel. He tried to make himself feel better by inflicting pain on Willie, because it made a nice change from inflicting pain on himself.
Willie didn't think the ghost he'd seen last night was the same as Barnabas at all. He didn't think that ghost made people suffer because of his own pain or fear. He didn't believe that the warlock's ghost felt hatred; he believed that hatred was the only thing the ghost was.
One thing the warlock's ghost did have in common with Barnabas in the old days: there'd been no chance of Willie disobeying him. The ghost, in fact, had more control over Willie than Barnabas ever had. At least when Barnabas had ordered Willie to do things he knew he were wrong, Willie still had enough freedom to complain and feel bad about it.
The ghost had looked at Willie and spoke into his mind a command to sit there and do nothing. And sit there and do nothing was just what Willie did. He sat and did nothing while the ghost held out one hand to Daphne, and she stood up and walked toward him. Willie sat and did nothing as the ghost opened the door for Daphne and ushered her through, and he kept on sitting there doing nothing for he didn't know how long.
Finally, something had seemed to snap back into place inside him. He could move again, and he jumped up knowing that by the time he got to Collinwood, he would be far too late.
Only he couldn't have dreamed how much too late he would be.
As he was running uphill on the familiar path through the woods, he kept thinking of all the things Barnabas and Julia had said about the Collinwood they'd found in 1995. The foyer and drawing room wrecked, with trees and vines growing up inside them. Carolyn and Quentin crazy, David dead, and the rest of the family mysteriously vanished. And that evil ghost playing king of the castle, murdering anybody who was dumb enough to believe exploring a cursed mansion was a cool thing to do.
It wasn't that he'd really disbelieved Barnabas and Julia when they told him about all of that. But there was a big difference between believing what they said, and actually accepting that it was all going to happen.
When he got to the great house, it didn't matter anymore if he believed it or not.
He was still running along the side lawn toward Collinwood's front door when he saw five or six guys walk out of the house. He couldn't see them all that clearly, but he saw clear enough to know that a couple of those guys were big, like wrestlers. The whole gang of them seemed to be walking weirdly—in kind of a slow, mostly-steady march, but now and then staggering, like they were walking into a strong head-wind. They were trooping away from Collinwood on a diagonal route across the front lawn. Another weird thing about them was that the route they were following wouldn't take them to the road that led down the hill into town. Instead, it would take them straight to the Old Collins Cemetery.
Willie thought that pretty much everything about those guys seemed weird, but he figured right now they probably weren't his biggest problem. He had the awful feeling he was about to find bigger problems in Collinwood.
He didn't even have to get into the house before he knew how right that feeling was. Those guys had left the front door standing open, and even from outside Willie could see that Barnabas and Julia's predictions had come true.
He could get inside the house, but from right inside the front door the foyer was almost completely choked with rubble. Part of the ceiling had fallen in. A mess of huge beams and joists, with dangling, broken planks and fragments of plaster, slanted in the middle of the foyer like some crazy lean-to, propped against the front wall. All of the furniture that he could see seemed to have been thrown around and piled on top of each other—except for the grandfather clock, still standing guard beside the drawing room door. But right in front of that clock, somebody had lit a bonfire.
Willie was staring at that fire and trying to remember how far it was to the nearest outdoor faucet and garden hose, when somebody over to his right screamed, "Willie!"
He looked over and could just see Mrs. Johnson by the door to the kitchen, trying to clamber her way through the barricade of overturned and piled-up tables. She was waving something long and red, and he realized after a few more seconds that the thing she was waving was the fire extinguisher from the kitchen. Mrs. Johnson yelled at him, "Here, Willie, take the extinguisher!"
Holding up his hands, he yelled back to her, "Okay, Mrs. J., I'm open!" The housekeeper managed to get herself to a spot mostly clear of table legs, and hurled the extinguisher at him in an over-hand throw that made him think Mrs. J. wouldn't be a bad addition to a football team.
Willie had used fire extinguishers before; that was one of the least weird things you found yourself doing when fighting the kind of emergencies that popped up around Collinwood. He scrambled around the lean-to of fallen ceiling and started spraying out the bonfire. When the fire was reduced to a blackened, stinking mess, and he couldn't see any more flames or sparks, Willie turned to help Mrs. Johnson get past the last of the furniture blockade.
"Mrs. J.," he began, "what the hell happened—?"
Mrs. Johnson wasn't taking the time for any explanations. As she was still sliding down the overturned sideboard, she said wildly, "Mr. Malloy! He was in the secret passage, looking for the children." She pointed toward the drawing room.
Willie had often thought it was silly that all of them kept calling those passages "secret," since by now everybody around Collinwood had gone trudging through the passages at least a time or two. Mrs. Johnson was now speeding for the drawing room's entrance to one of the non-secret passages, and Willie followed her.
They had barely made it into the drawing room before Mrs. J. cried out, "Hurry, Willie, help!" Then she was diving into the next mountain of rubble with the fearlessness of a rescue dog.
The ceiling had fallen in here, too, almost totally blocking the door to the non-secret passage. To make matters worse, the massive dark armoire, or whatever the heck that Charles Atlas of cupboards was called, had fallen over, though Willie didn't see how anything short of the end of the world could cause that thing to budge. Between the fallen armoire and the collapsed ceiling, Willie could hardly even see that the passage door was open. Mrs. Johnson, however, had seen that, and she'd also seen that someone was lying in that doorway.
Willie waded into the rubble after Mrs. J., gritting his teeth and thinking, Please don't let any more of that ceiling fall in before we get out of here! If he'd ever had any doubts about the fact that Mrs. Johnson was in love with her employer, those doubts would have been forever put to rest when he saw the burning-eyed look on her face as she shifted timbers, chunks of plaster and scattered books, digging her way down to the unconscious Bill Malloy.
That Malloy was unconscious, not dead, was proved when he groaned as Mrs. Johnson and Willie lifted a ceiling joist off his back. Willie figured the man must at least have a collection of broken bones. But Mr. Malloy's eyes opened almost as soon as the joist was off him, and he was sitting up a couple of seconds after that.
Malloy was coated everywhere with dirt and powdered plaster. He had a cut somewhere on his head, as was obvious from the trail of blood slicing through the plaster-dust on his face. His right arm was hurt, too. The arm hung limply, and blood had turned some of the powdered plaster on his jacket's sleeve to a salmon-like pink. But, just like Mrs. Johnson had done, Bill Malloy didn't take any time for thinking about himself. The first thing he said was, "Liz. She was in the study."
Now Mrs. Johnson and Willie were helping Malloy to stand up and stagger across the field of rubble. Once past the worst wreckage of the drawing room's ceiling, Mr. Malloy shrugged off their help and, in spite of whatever injuries he had, was almost running as he headed into the foyer. He skirted around the remains of the bonfire, kicking some of it aside, and limped down the hall toward the study, Mrs. Johnson and Willie scrambling to keep up with him.
Elizabeth Collins Malloy was lying in the doorway to the study. At first all Willie could see of her was her feet, in their modestly high-heeled shoes, and her legs, as her husband knelt down at her side. Willie didn't see her face until Bill Malloy had lifted her in his arms and buried his face against her neck. Malloy was rocking back and forth as he held his wife close to him, making sounds that weren't quite words and weren't quite sobs, but were some kind of mixture of both.
Elizabeth's eyes were open, looking glassy and horrified. Her head lolled loosely at a strange and terrible angle, and the discolorations on her throat looked to Willie like they had to be finger marks.
He and Mrs. Johnson stood helplessly, afraid to even touch Mr. Malloy, let alone offer him any help. Willie suddenly realized he felt tears rolling down his face. Not even bothering to smudge the tears away, he asked hoarsely, "Mrs. J., who else was in here? Where are Barnabas and Julia?"
She gave him a startled look. "Weren't they at the Old House with you?"
"They went into town to look for Quentin. But they must have come back here. I saw Julia's car outside."
Mrs. Johnson shook her head. Then, suddenly, new fear swept over her face. "Carolyn!" Mrs. Johnson whispered. "She was upstairs in her room."
The second-floor hallway, at least, turned out to be intact. As they'd run upstairs, Willie had imagined himself and Mrs. Johnson needing to do acrobatics along a shattered hallway floor in order to reach Carolyn's room. The door to Carolyn's bedroom stood open, but nothing in it seemed out of place and the young woman herself was nowhere to be seen.
Again Willie and Mrs. Johnson stood looking helplessly at each other. "Those guys I saw leaving the house," Willie finally managed to say. "Are they the ones who did all this?"
Mrs. Johnson gave a confused frown. "Yes," she said, "some of it. I don't know how they could make the ceiling fall in. But they're the ones who set the fire in the foyer and threw the furniture around."
"Okay. So if those guys came upstairs and Carolyn saw them, where would she go to hide from them?"
"How can we know?" Mrs. Johnson murmured, clasping her hands and bringing them up near her mouth. "It would depend on where they were coming from, and whether her way was blocked. But … I think we should try the tower room."
Now and then calling out "Carolyn!" as they went, they followed the maze of hallways and stairwells that led to the tower room. And that was where they found her, huddled in a back corner of the big old wardrobe. As Carolyn crouched there, she was cradling close to her chest the severed, hairless head of some old china doll. Willie's stomach did a back-flip at the sight, since his first thought was that she was holding a baby's skull.
Carolyn giggled and smiled up at Willie and Mrs. Johnson. "You found me," she said cheerfully. "But I still won the hide-and-seek, because you took so long. Is it time for the ice cream and cake?" She frowned a little, then, and went on, "I don't want those men to come to the party, though. I didn't like them. They scared me."
"No, no, of course not," Mrs. Johnson told her in a strained, almost choking voice. She reached into the wardrobe to help Carolyn out of it. "No, don't worry about them, Carolyn. They won't be coming to the party."
Between them, Mrs. Johnson and Willie succeeded in shepherding Carolyn to her bedroom—still clutching that spooky doll's head to her bosom as they went. There was some trouble when they got to her room, since she didn't see why she should stay there instead of continuing downstairs for the ice cream and cake. At the bedroom door, Willie hissed to Mrs. Johnson, "You do what you can to keep her in here. I'll keep looking for the others."
He went downstairs first to see if he could find a working flashlight. That quest turned out to be a quick success. The sideboard in the drawing room was pretty much intact; Willie just had to shift aside some ceiling rubble to get to it. Several flashlights were still nestled snugly inside their usual drawer. Speaking of shifting aside rubble, Bill Malloy had removed the chunks of ceiling from the drawing room sofa and had placed his wife's body there, instead. Willie didn't want to look over at the body or at the new widower, but he found himself doing that, anyway. He saw that Mr. Malloy had closed Elizabeth's eyes. Malloy was now sitting on the floor beside the sofa, holding his wife's hand. He didn't look up or seem to notice at all while Willie was shifting rubble to find the flashlights.
As he hurried upstairs again, Willie thought that seeing Elizabeth's corpse hadn't been nearly as bad as seeing the emptiness on Bill Malloy's face.
He found Julia in the west wing's hallway, along with three corpses. Julia was kneeling on the floor near the end of the hall, holding Barnabas' wolf's-head cane. She clutched the cane to her chest in the same way as Carolyn had been holding the china doll's head. The three bodies lying beyond her, outside the door to that linen closet Barnabas and Julia kept on searching, were those of David Collins, Hallie Stokes, and Daphne the former ghost.
Willie felt too overwhelmed by all of this to really feel sad about the kids' deaths—yet. He thought, I guess being a former ghost didn't save Daphne from dying again. Distantly he noticed that the young woman's body was clothed in a dress he figured must be from her own time, instead of the mini-dress she'd been wearing the last time he saw her alive.
Crouching down beside his friend, Willie said quietly, "Hey, Julia." He thought, Please don't let her start talking about playing hide-and-seek and getting ice cream and cake.
To his relief, when she turned her gaze and started speaking to him, she sounded at least mostly sane. "We were too late, Willie," she told him. "By the time we got here, he'd killed them already, and he'd already left. At least we got their bodies out of the room in time. Barnabas said we should do that, so the room didn't disappear with them still inside it. It's a good thing we did. We were still here in the hallway when the zombies came. When we tried to go into the room, to barricade it against them and hold them off, it had changed into the linen closet again."
"Zombies?" Willie repeated blankly at first. Then he said, "Holy shit, Julia, those five guys I saw were zombies?"
She nodded, saying, "There were six of them, I think. The warlock must have summoned them. Barnabas said they must have been 'ye who do not rest.'"
"Julia," Willie said, with a feeling of dread creeping up in his gut, "where's Barnabas?"
"He's dead, Willie," she answered. In her eyes, Willie saw the same kind of emptiness he'd seen downstairs in the drawing room, on the face of Bill Malloy.
"What do you mean? Barnabas can't die. I mean, he's already dead, isn't he? Undead, I mean. So he can't die, can he?"
"Yes, Willie, he can. He died right here. While I was holding his hand."
Impossible grief was just starting to spread in him, but it still felt too impossible for him to make himself believe it. He whispered, "What happened to him?"
"When the zombies came, we went into the closet and tried to hold the door closed against them. They were too strong. They pushed it open and dragged us out into the hallway. Barnabas tried to fight them. He tried to beat them away with his cane. One of them grabbed the cane from him and stabbed Barnabas with it. Impaled him. It went all the way through his chest … and stuck out a few inches, out of his back."
These last sentences, she had spoken while gazing down at the cane in her hands.
"But, Julia," Willie began. He was trying to hang on to some inconsistency in her story, as if an inconsistency might make all of it be not true. "But, Julia, there's no blood on the cane."
She nodded. "Just after Barnabas was stabbed, the zombies suddenly seemed to lose interest in us. They just walked away down the hall, back the way they'd come. As if they'd done whatever they'd been summoned to do, and now it was time for them to go. Barnabas was lying here," she continued, looking down at the floor, "right here. I'm not certain if the cane pierced his heart. If it didn't, it came very close. I don't know if a vampire can live a little longer, after his heart's been pierced. I never … had the chance to study it before."
For the first time since Willie had found her, Julia's voice broke on a sob. Then she very obviously pulled herself back together.
"He held my hand," she said, "and he smiled at me. He told me, 'I'm sorry, Julia.' And then he died."
Julia dragged her gaze away from the floor, up to Willie's face. "When he was dead," she went on, "he just faded away to dust. His clothes, too … everything. All that was left, was his cane. And this," she added. She slowly opened her right hand, that up until now, she had held in a fist. In Julia's hand, Willie saw Barnabas' ring.
"Then," Willie murmured, still barely believing it, "then that's why there isn't any blood on the cane? Because his blood … turned to dust?"
"Yes," Julia answered. "There was blood. There was … a lot of it. But it faded away, too. His blood turned to dust … just like everything else."
Willie Loomis had lived through some very long nights since the night three years ago when he disturbed Barnabas Collins in his coffin. But this night was certainly one of the longest. It was after 3:30 before the last police car and the ambulance drove away from Collinwood—not that the ambulance or its medics had been able to do any kind of good for Elizabeth, David, Hallie or Daphne. As they stood outside the front door, watching the ambulance's tail lights dwindle away in the distance, Julia started to tell Mr. Malloy that all of them ought to move to the Old House, instead of staying in the half-ruined mansion which the warlock's ghost had claimed for his own. Then suddenly she interrupted herself, exclaiming, "Quentin! I forgot about him. We left him out here by the car; I haven't seen him since Barnabas and I ran in to the house." Turning toward Willie, she continued, "When we were in 1995, Professor Stokes told us that … after Collinwood was destroyed, Quentin was found, babbling incoherently, wandering in the woods."
Willie sighed. "Of course he was. It's the kinda stuff that happens around here. Okay, Julia. While the others get packed and move over to the Old House, you wanna come with me and we'll search the woods for Quentin?"
She gave a brittle smile and answered him, "Yes. Why not? Maybe it will … help to take my mind off things."
When Julia and Willie found Quentin, it was nearly dawn. Willie thought he never wanted to see another dawn again, after this one. After this morning, he hoped he would always be asleep at dawn—not that that prospect seemed very likely. At least maybe on future mornings, he could be in bed pretending to himself that he was asleep.
Willie didn't want to see dawn again, because of the memories dawn would bring with it. He didn't want to think about all the times he had watched for the approaching sunrise, worrying with or worrying about Barnabas.
"Wandering in the woods, babbling incoherently" seemed to be a pretty fair description of what Quentin was doing when they found him. They'd finally tracked him down near the half-burned McGruder place—the house which most folks around Collinwood had started calling Rose Cottage over these past few days, thanks to that guy Mr. Miller who was weirdly and complicatedly connected with (and identical to) the warlock's ghost.
Quentin was apparently just strolling around, and not noticing or caring when he walked through bushes or tree-branches, judging by the rips in his clothes and the scratches on his face. While they were looking for him, Julia had filled Willie in on the story of events at the Drew Mausoleum earlier that night—although she almost broke down crying several times, when her story dwelt on Barnabas. Willie was glad she had told him the story, hair-raising though it was, since otherwise he would have had a hell of a shock when he saw the dried blood all down the front of Quentin Collins' shirt.
As for the incoherent babbling, Quentin was talking to himself, on and on without stopping. It seemed that, in his mind, he was talking to a whole lot of different women.
He talked to Daphne, begging her to come back to him. He told her he wanted things between them to go back to the way they were when the two of them first met. He told her he wanted to smell the lilacs again, and he promised that if she would just come back and let them start over again, he would never, ever tell Barnabas and Julia that she was appearing to him.
He talked to Laura, saying things about the high priests dragging her to the pyre and setting it alight. He talked to Amanda, telling her he was sorry about leaving her on the bridge that night, and that if they had another chance, he promised her he wouldn't do it again. He talked to Lenore, insisting that he'd wanted to be there for her, he wished he could have been, but it was complicated; there were just some things in a man's life that he couldn't control, no matter how much he wanted to. He talked to "Grandmama," apologizing for stealing her will, and promising that if she gave him another chance, he wouldn't do that again, either.
At one point, Quentin became aware of Willie and Julia's presence enough to ask them, with a frightened look, if they thought Miss Trilling would find him out here in the woods, and if she did, if they would protect him from her. Then he talked to someone that Willie guessed had to be Roxanne Drew, the vampire. He told her he was very sorry he couldn't do what she wanted him to; she was really very beautiful and very charming, and it wasn't her fault he couldn't react the way she wanted. He told her that it felt great, when she drank his blood, but couldn't she please just stop doing it for a while? It was really wearing him out … And if she let him go, the first thing he'd do was go over to Barnabas' place, go up to the attic and tear up his damned magic portrait.
"We'd better lock that storeroom where his portrait is, Julia," Willie muttered, while they were leading the unresisting but still talking Quentin down the hill to the Old House. He shook his head as Quentin's monologue worked its way around again to telling his grandmother he was sorry for stealing her will. "You know," Willie added, "sometimes I think I've done a lot of things I should be sorry about, but, jeez! It sounds like my halo's squeaky clean, compared with some of the things Quentin's got to be sorry for."
"That's one problem with being immortal," Julia muttered back. "It gives a person more time to build up regrets, than we mortals have to deal with."
"Yeah," agreed Willie, feeling the sudden lump of grief in his throat. "Yeah, I guess so." He knew as clearly as if she had told him, that she was thinking of Barnabas when she said that, just like he had thought of Barnabas when he heard it.
How long is this gonna last? Willie asked himself. How long will we have to deal with the fact that everything makes us think of Barnabas?
And now, here he and Julia were, in the sunlit parlor of the Old House, and it was getting on towards noon. The two of them had only gotten through a little more than twelve hours so far in this world where Barnabas was dead. It was only twelve hours, and already it felt to him like they'd been wading through their grief for years.
Mr. Malloy and Mrs. Johnson were upstairs with Carolyn, in Josette's room—the room, Willie reflected, that was kept ready for every imperiled and more-or-less deranged young lady who got brought to the Old House for sanctuary. Last night, that chick Daphne was there in Josette's room, before she got lured away and killed by the ghostly warlock. Now it was Carolyn's turn to move in, as she giggled her way through some fantasy childhood which she apparently liked a lot better than she liked the world in which her mother and her cousin had just been murdered by zombies—and Willie sure couldn't blame her for that.
Quentin was just down the hall from Carolyn, in another of the bedrooms that Willie fixed up a few years ago at Barnabas' instructions: the room that, Barnabas had told him, used to belong to his uncle Jeremiah. For now, Quentin seemed happy to stay in that room, and it didn't seem like he'd made any attempts yet to destroy his portrait in the attic—although Willie had followed up on his resolution and locked the storeroom with the portrait in it, just to be on the safe side. The times Willie had checked in on Quentin, including when he'd brought him a breakfast of toast, bacon and Tang, Quentin seemed mostly to be talking to Daphne, saying he missed her and begging her to come back.
Willie was scowling to himself as he headed into the hallway from his latest check-in with Quentin. He thought about what Quentin's running monologue revealed about his secret romance with Daphne the ghost—which had been going on for who-knows-how-long before Barnabas and Julia found out about it.
Willie thought, If I do feel like I gotta blame myself for what happened last night, there's sure a lot of other blame-worthy folks to keep me company. So the ghost-warlock did his mind-control whammy on me and made me sit like a lump while he lured Daphne away. That doesn't make me any more to blame than poor Mr. Malloy and Mrs. Johnson, when His Ghostly Evilness made the lights go out at Collinwood, and by the time they got to the flashlights, the kids had disappeared. If I don't think I should blame them—which I don't—why should I blame myself?
And then there's Quentin, who may have been sniffing the lilacs with ghost-Daphne for weeks, for all we know. He oughtta shoulder a lot of the blame, for whatever help he gave the ghosts all that time while he was making goo-goo eyes at Daphne.
Yeah, he reminded himself, and now Quentin's paying for that screw-up by having such a bad trip that 25 years from now, he's still gonna be talking to himself 24/7, crying for Daphne, and trying to knife his portrait.
Willie knocked quietly at the door to Josette's room. He was answered by Mrs. Johnson, who put a finger to her lips and stepped into the hallway to talk with him.
Before Mrs. J. shut the door behind her, Willie got a glimpse of Mr. Malloy and Carolyn, standing beside the sun-streaming window. Bill Malloy had changed his clothes before they left Collinwood last night, and had cleaned himself up to the extent of sticking his head under a faucet to wash away the plaster-dust and blood. Julia had bandaged Malloy's wounded arm—she said he had a deep laceration, but no bones had been broken—but the bandage was hidden by his clothes. There should be nothing about him that would look alarming to Carolyn. Willie had heard Malloy say that to Julia, while she was bandaging his wound last night: that all he cared about now was protecting Carolyn.
Except, thought Willie, that the man is reeling from having just lost the love of his life. So how the hell does he expect he'll be able to act all normal and cheerful, even if he is desperate to keep Carolyn thinking that everything's okay?
"How are things going in there?" Willie asked Mrs. J.
She sighed and shook her head. "I don't know," she said. "Sometimes Carolyn seems to understand what's really going on. Sometimes …" Mrs. Johnson went on again after a frowning pause, "Mr. Malloy and I did our best to explain to her what happened. At times she remembers what we told her. Then she's grieving. But most of the time … most of the time she is somewhere else. She's in some other world inside her head."
"Yeah," Willie sighed. He thought, And according to Barnabas and Julia, from what they saw in 1995, that's the world she's gonna be in for the rest of her life.
Mrs. Johnson told him, "Mr. Malloy and I think it's best that we take her to his house in town. He's trying to convince her to go there now. It'll be easier than staying here—the house does have more modern amenities—"
At her disapproving tone when she said that, Willie felt a jolt of defensiveness. Hey, he thought, it's not my fault this place only has electricity in the basement, and the toilets and shower are in a separate building like in a campground, 'cause Barnabas wouldn't let me get any plumbing run into the house. Barnabas wouldn't stand for any of that new-fangled stuff; he said it would destroy the house's authenticity.
"And," continued Mrs. J., "we think all of us should get farther away from … that ghost at Collinwood."
"Yeah," Willie said, with a feeling like ice-cold fingers scraping his spine. "Yeah, we should."
He was thinking about that as he walked downstairs. They knew the ghost-warlock wasn't confined to Collinwood. Willie himself had seen the ghost here in the Old House last night. And even if the warlock weren't able to leave Collinwood, Willie wouldn't want to stay here with a murdering evil ghost for next-door neighbor.
And there were other, stronger reasons why he didn't want to stay.
Willie and Julia hadn't talked yet about what they were going to do. He resolved that they would talk about it, soon; hopefully right after the others headed into town.
He sure hoped Julia's plans, like his own, involved getting the hell out. He knew he didn't want to spend even one more night in this house. He didn't want to face the prospect of going to bed, and trying and failing to sleep, with his memories all around him.
Back when he and Julia had believed Barnabas was dead, at the end of Angelique's dream curse, Julia had told Willie he could come with her to Windcliff. She had promised him a job there. He hoped like crazy the offer would still be open now. What he wanted most, right now, was the chance for a fresh start in someplace new—someplace where he wouldn't be reminded of Barnabas by every stick of furniture.
When he got downstairs and told Julia about Malloy and Mrs. Johnson's plans, she roused herself from her grief-stricken stupor. "Yes," she said, standing up and straightening her skirt. "Yes, I think that's right. We all ought to go farther away."
Gently, Julia set down Barnabas' cane on his chair, as if the cane was a living thing. She said, "I'll go upstairs and see if they need any help." Her sudden purposefulness made Willie realize that she probably felt the same way he did. When she could do something to help someone else, she didn't hurt quite so badly.
Before Julia reached the staircase, Bill Malloy, Carolyn and Mrs. Johnson walked onto the landing. As they headed down the stairs, Malloy was saying, "You'll enjoy yourself at my place, Princess. You can think of it as … a vacation. It's right by the beach; we can go beachcombing and …" His words ran down miserably as he obviously failed to think of anything else they could do.
When they paused in the entryway at the foot of the stairs, Mrs. Johnson said with forced brightness, "I'll bake those molasses cookies you like, Carolyn. And … I know what we can do; we can have one of those old-fashioned taffy pulls. Did you ever do that when you were growing up?"
Smiling, the young woman answered, "I think I did once, at a friend's birthday party." She giggled. "That would be fun, don't you think so, Bill? Only you'll need to be careful not to get taffy in your beard."
"Ay-yuh," Malloy said gruffly, and Willie hated to think of how hard the man must be fighting to hold himself together. "I'll bear that in mind, Princess."
Listening to them, Willie realized that Carolyn wasn't talking with that Cockney accent anymore. He wondered if that Leticia or whatever her name was had given up on possessing her.
He thought, Maybe Leticia got the hell out of Dodge when the zombies attacked the house. If she did, I sure don't blame her.
"We should have David and Hallie come over for the taffy pull," Carolyn was saying, "and my mother. Only …" Her brows drew together in a puzzled little frown. "Where did you tell me my mother and the children have gone?"
Opening the front door and trying to usher Carolyn outside, Bill Malloy forced out the words, "We can talk about that at my place. We ought to be going."
Carolyn was now puzzling harder. "But that can't be right," she said, "my mother never leaves the house. She hasn't left Collinwood for the past 18 years."
"That was years ago, Princess. Your mother started leaving Collinwood again after she gave that McGuire fellow his marching orders. Now, let's get going," he tried again, and Willie thought it would be a miracle if Carolyn didn't notice the desperation in his voice. "That taffy isn't going to pull itself."
Miracle or not, Carolyn did not seem to have noticed. She was still looking troubled, but she forced herself to smile a little and said, "All right, Bill, if you think we should. I keep thinking there's something I'm forgetting, that we should be doing at Collinwood …"
"No, Princess," Bill Malloy said fiercely. "There's nothing for us at Collinwood."
As Malloy and his stepdaughter finally walked outside, Julia asked Mrs. Johnson, "Is there any luggage that needs bringing out? Anything we can do to help?"
"No, thank you, Dr. Hoffman," answered Mrs. J., with a weary effort at a smile. "We left the luggage in Mr. Malloy's car last night."
"Well, then," Julia said, very clearly wishing there was more she could say or do, "have a good trip into town. Willie and I may be leaving soon ourselves … but we won't leave town without stopping by Bill's place to talk with you."
Mrs. Johnson nodded. "Be careful," she said, "both of you. Don't go back there if you can help it."
"Don't worry, Mrs. Johnson," Julia promised her, "we won't."
When they were alone again (not counting the crazy man upstairs), Julia slowly walked toward the fireplace. She stood for a while looking down at Barnabas' cane, where it sat in its owner's favorite chair. Finally, she picked up the cane and took a seat again in the chair opposite, carefully setting the cane across her lap.
Willie was standing in the hallway, feeling at loose ends and wondering if it would tick Julia off if he offered to make more tea. Julia looked over at him and asked, "What do you think, Willie? Would you still be interested in a job at Windcliff?"
He felt swamped with relief. "I was hoping you were gonna ask me that," he admitted. He walked into the parlor and perched awkwardly on the loveseat by the bay window. Even though Barnabas had recently been treating him more like a friend than a servant, he hadn't gotten comfortable with sitting on the parlor furniture. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he still had the fear that the Barnabas from three years ago would punish him for making himself at home on furniture intended for the use of guests.
"Yeah, I'm interested in a job there," Willie said, managing to grin a little. "You know if one's available?"
"I'm sure one is," she smiled at him. "And you'll be a shoe-in for it, since the famous Dr. Julia Hoffman will write your letter of recommendation."
He scratched his neck, feeling weirdly bashful about it as they continued the running joke. "Yeah. I guess you couldn't turn down a candidate with a recommendation like that. So when do you wanna leave?"
"As soon as possible," she said firmly—exactly as he'd hoped she would. "I don't see any reason why we can't leave today. It shouldn't take long to close up this house. We'll have to take Quentin with us, of course …"
That'll be fun, Willie thought. We'll get to spend the whole drive to Windcliff listening to Quentin apologize to 100 years-worth of women. But, he reminded himself, if he was planning on working at Windcliff, he shouldn't have a problem with listening to crazy people.
"What about his portrait?" Willie asked. "It doesn't seem safe, just leaving it in a storeroom when nobody's gonna be here. But if we take it to Windcliff with us, he might find it …"
"Yes," Julia said. After some frowning thought, she decided, "We can ask Bill to store it in his attic. That seems like the safest course. In fact," she went on, as another idea came to her, "why don't you take the portrait to Bill's house now? And you can tell Bill and Mrs. Johnson about our plans. That way we won't have to risk Quentin seeing us move the portrait."
"Good idea," Willie agreed, glad to have something to do. "I'll go get it."
He had just stood up, when a flurry of sharp and unexpected knocks sounded on the front door.
Willie and Julia stared at each other in alarm. Then Julia came up with a reasonable-sounding explanation. "It's probably the sheriff," she said wearily. "He must be back to ask us more questions." Suddenly concerned again, she looked down at the cane that lay across her knees. "Quick, Willie!" she exclaimed. She jumped to her feet and held the cane out to him. "Hide Barnabas' cane! If the sheriff sees it, he'll know we lied last night, about Barnabas being out of town."
"Oh!" Willie yelped out. "Right!" Taking the cane from her hand, he stood frozen for a moment. At first his mind was totally blank on where he could hide it. Then he thought, The sheriff won't have any reason to go into the dining room. He hurried through the door beside the fireplace. For another moment he stood looking around before gingerly walking over and setting down the cane on a shelf of the arch-topped built-in china cabinet in one corner of the room. As he walked from the room, he tried not to feel that it was disrespectful of him to leave Barnabas' cane just lying around.
Heading back into the parlor, he was readying himself to say something like, "Oh, afternoon, sheriff. Come on in." Then he stopped, staring in shock.
Julia had opened the front door. Now she, too, was standing and staring, at the person who stood framed by the doorway.
Radiantly blond and unbelievably beautiful, the woman who stood in the doorway to the Old House was the witch Angelique.
Willie heard Julia murmur the witch's name. Angelique said quietly, "I'm sorry, Julia. I'm so sorry."
Julia was fighting to keep her voice steady as she asked the witch, "You know that Barnabas is dead?"
"Yes," Angelique whispered. "I felt him die."
While Willie was asking himself if this was some crazy dream, Angelique Bouchard Collins Rumson held out her arms to Dr. Julia Hoffman. Julia exclaimed in a broken, half-choked voice, "Oh, God!" Then she threw herself into Angelique's arms.
The two women held each other close in the entryway of the Old House, and both of them were crying.
Angelique's crying was almost silent. Willie heard only an occasional shuddering breath from her as the tears poured down her face. Julia's sobs, as usual, sounded like the noises of an injured animal—an animal so badly injured that it ought to be put out of its misery.
Willie suddenly felt embarrassed, realizing that he was staring at the two crying women. He also realized there was a great, big lump in his throat. And there was also a very good chance that he had tears on his face. He quickly turned away and grabbed hold of the fireplace mantel. The second he did that, he remembered the many, many times he had seen Barnabas standing by the fireplace just like he was doing now, when Barnabas was fighting to gain control of his emotions.
Willie let go of the mantelpiece. He thought, This is Barnabas' place. Not mine.
He jumped a little when he heard Angelique's voice, speaking with a tone that somehow seemed to combine sorrow and amusement. "Mr. Loomis," she said, "I'm sorry we're leaving you out. Would you also like a shoulder to cry on?"
Willie rubbed the tears from his face and turned around. He saw Julia still standing in the hallway, mopping her face with her handkerchief. Angelique had taken a few steps into the parlor. She held out one hand to him, and she was tentatively smiling.
"No, thank you, ma'am," Willie said, "that's okay. But, um, it's good of you to offer."
"Why don't we all sit down," Julia proposed, trying hard to sound business-like. "There's no point in all of us just standing around crying."
Willie wondered, Is there any more point in us sitting around crying? But he brought one of the dining room chairs for himself and set it by the other chairs. Julia sat again in her usual chair, and Angelique seated herself on the loveseat. He guessed it shouldn't be a surprise to him that Angelique would know which one was Barnabas' chair, and would steer clear of it just like he and Julia were doing.
Trying not to look like he was staring, Willie glanced at the woman who had been Barnabas Collins' wife; the witch who cast the first spell that made Barnabas a vampire. When he remembered how different she had looked as Roger's wife Cassandra, he had a tough time accepting that the two women—the two witches—were one and the same person.
She now wore her golden hair in a loose but elegant bun, with little tendrils of curls framing the sides of her face. When she had walked over to the loveseat he'd noticed that she was dressed in a black pantsuit made from some thin, flowing material. Willie thought the outfit seemed just right for a magic-worker. It seemed like she was literally clothed in darkness.
What do you know, Willie, he thought, maybe in addition to working at Windcliff you can have a new career as a poet.
She walks in beauty, like the night, hunh? I've got news for you; somebody already wrote that.
Julia asked, keeping firm hold on her hard-won steadiness, "You said you felt Barnabas die?"
"Yes," Angelique answered quietly, a haunted look in her eyes. "It happened last night, at a few minutes before eleven o'clock." She went on to explain, "There wasn't generally any telepathic link between Barnabas and me. But we were closely enough connected, over the years … we were connected closely enough that I felt it when he was gone."
Angelique leaned toward Julia, and her gaze no longer seemed haunted. Now her eyes seemed to hold bitter determination. She said, "You must tell me everything. Explain everything to me, precisely as it happened."
Jeez, Willie thought, this is gonna be a long explanation. He stood up and asked Julia, "You reckon now's the right time for me to go make some more tea? You won't yell at me 'cause it's the tenth pot of tea I've made in the past six hours?"
Julia wearily smiled at him. "I don't think I yelled at you before, did I? But even if I did, I won't yell this time. I think now is the perfect time for another pot of tea."
In a dazzling change from her fiercely determined look, Angelique smiled charmingly and said, "Some tea would be lovely, thank you."
As it turned out, they went through two pots of tea before the explanation was finished, along with the lunch Willie made for all of them and also took a helping of upstairs to Quentin. He felt pretty stupid serving a meal like that to a guest who looked like she ought to be lunching at the Ritz; the contents of the larder weren't anything fancy, since usually Willie's grocery shopping was only for himself. But nobody complained about the lunch of peanut butter sandwiches, apple slices and Oreos.
Once when he went upstairs to check on Quentin, Willie had some bad moments when he found that the mad cousin wasn't in his room. Aw, hell, Willie thought, don't tell me he's upstairs trying to break into the storeroom and rip up his portrait. But before he could run up the next flight of chairs to check on that, he saw Quentin wander out of one of the rooms farther down the hallway.
"Oh, hello," Quentin said in a mildly surprised sort of tone when Willie hurried up to him. "Do you know where she is? I have to find her. I keep looking for her, but … she just doesn't seem to be anywhere."
Willie wondered, What "her" is he looking for this time? Does he want to tell Grandmama he's sorry about stealing her will? But Quentin went on, looking vaguely at some spot on the ceiling, "Where are you, Daphne? I have to see you again. Please come to me. Please don't stay away from me."
Taking Quentin by the arm, Willie started gently herding him along. "Come on, let's go back to your room. That's probably where Daphne'll go to look for you."
"Do you think so?" Quentin asked, blinking at him in confusion. "I don't know, I—that's right, this is the wrong house, isn't it? Daphne haunts at Collinwood. I have to go there to look for her."
Oh, shit, Willie thought. We do not want him going there. And I don't want to go there chasing him. I'm not letting Quentin and me be the first people who get murdered by that creep dropping busts of Roman emperors on our heads!
Willie told himself that the risk of Quentin constantly running off to Collinwood made another very good reason why they all ought to go live at Windcliff. Only, considering Windcliff's track record for its patients escaping, there seemed a strong chance that Willie would spend the rest of his life periodically hunting down Quentin, every time this particular mad Collins escaped and set out to see Daphne.
For this time, at least, Quentin seemed willing to accept Willie's argument, "No, man, this is where you gotta wait for her. Right here in this room. You need to stay put here so it's easier for her to find you."
"All right," Quentin said. He sat down in the chair by the window and gave Willie a smile that made him suddenly feel like crying. Shit, Willie thought, as he hurried back downstairs, maybe I'm not cut out to work at Windcliff. Not if it makes me cry every time some loony-tune smiles at me!
As Angelique had asked of her, Julia's explanation went step-by-step through it all: the trip to Parallel Time, the detour to 1995, the months of trying and failing to hold back doom—the final, horrible night.
Angelique sat frowning when Julia had finished. Willie thought she looked like a general planning a campaign. Finally, she said to Julia, "There may be no real harm in speaking this warlock's name, but I suppose it makes sense to remain cautious. I certainly don't wish to let him know that I'm here, if there is any way we can avoid that. Will you write down for me the name that Professor Stokes found?"
"Of course." Julia went quickly to Barnabas' secretary desk, got a piece of stationery, wrote the name and took it to Angelique. Willie guessed it was probably just the power of suggestion, but he still got shivers from seeing that name on the paper: Judah Zachary.
Lips pursed and brows drawn together, Angelique studied the name. "Yes," she said finally, and she crumpled the stationery in her hand. "I have heard of him. He will be a formidable opponent—but we already knew that. And," she continued, with a fierce smile, "I am a formidable opponent, also."
"You think you can break his power over Collinwood?" Julia asked. "It … seems impossible."
Weirdly, Angelique seemed suddenly to be in a very good mood. Willie guessed she probably enjoyed the thrill of the fight. The witch observed, "As Napoleon is supposed to have said, 'Impossible is not French.' I have considered myself French from time to time. But more to the point, we could change that phrase to say that the people of Collinwood will not allow themselves to be defeated by impossibilities. Tell me, Julia: haven't you gone through something like this before? Didn't it seem impossible to stop Quentin's ghost, when he drove everyone from Collinwood and he murdered David? But neither you nor Barnabas allowed that impossibility to stop you. You went to 1897 and you changed what happened. That is what we now have to do again."
Willie and Julia looked suddenly at each other. There was a hesitant, wondering look in Julia's face, and Willie thought it was a pretty good guess that he looked that same way, himself. He asked himself, Is there really any point in hoping?
Angelique was going on, "Your Mr. Miller, or Gerard Stiles, is one key at the center of all of this. And he seems to be the key we have the best chance of using. The first thing I must do is to bring him back here. Julia," she asked, "do you have anything that belonged to him? That truly belonged to him," she added, "not to the one who stole his body."
"Well," Julia began, frowning, "I suppose he may have left his own clothes at the inn, if he didn't go back there to check out when he ran away last night … No, wait!" she interrupted herself. "There is something; it's in the car."
Julia sped outside and was back again moments later. She was triumphantly carrying a piece of black cloth which she handed to Angelique.
"His cravat," Julia explained. "It's part of the outfit he was wearing when he came back to life. He told me he took off some of the outfit so he could blend in better in 1970. Most of the outfit he took with him to the inn, but he dropped the cravat in my car. I found it a couple of days ago; I kept meaning to give it back to him, and kept forgetting."
"Good," said Angelique. She gave a distant smile as she began to lightly run her fingers over the cloth. "This ought to be perfect." Her expression getting less distant again, she looked at Julia and Willie. "This next part will take a while," she told them, her smile growing impish, "and I'm afraid it won't be very interesting. I'm afraid I can't just wiggle my nose and make Mr. Stiles appear to us."
You're kidding me, Willie thought. Angelique the witch watches Bewitched?
I guess she isn't into making everything seem the way it used to be, like Barnabas was. You never would have seen Barnabas permitting a TV to darken his doorway! And I bet Angelique doesn't have any objections to electricity, phones or modern plumbing.
It did take a while, just like she'd said it would. At first Angelique simply sat motionless, holding the cravat in both hands. Her eyes were closed and she was whispering something too softly for Willie to hear. After maybe ten minutes of that, the witch opened her eyes, smiled, and announced, "He's heard me. Now we simply have to wait for him to get here."
That wait took close to another three hours. They talked for part of the time, Angelique grilling Julia for even more details about the warlock's reign of terror in 1995, and what they had learned from Mr. Miller about his shared history with the warlock. Part of the time, Julia sat upstairs with Quentin and Angelique stood gazing out the front window, absently sipping at her cup of tea from the latest pot Willie had brewed up. Willie thought, If things go on like this, the next disaster at the Collins estate will be that we'll run out of tea!
Willie occupied himself with housework, feeling like an idiot for cleaning a house they were just about to close up, but knowing he had to keep himself busy somehow. Dusting all the knickknacks and countless surfaces and giving the downstairs a good sweeping seemed like better options than gnawing his fingernails.
He was outside sweeping autumn leaves off the front porch, when he saw a man trudging toward the house from the direction of the road that led into town. The man was walking pretty slowly, but Willie saw with relief that he wasn't stumbling like those zombies last night. And when the man got a little nearer, Willie recognized him.
I'll be damned, Willie thought. Mr. Miller himself! That Angelique really knows her job.
Now, please let it turn out she's right to feel confident about the rest of this.
Willie stepped back inside the house and called up the stairs, "Hey, Julia, come on down! Our next guest is arriving."
Mr. Miller, not to put too fine a point on it, looked like shit. His clothes—or rather, Roger Collins' clothes—looked like he'd been sleeping in them for days, which Willie guessed he probably had. They were wrinkled, splotched with stuff and generally disreputable, and Willie grinned a little as he thought of what a conniption fit poor Roger would have if he saw them. Mr. Miller's wild mess of hair made Willie think of whatever classical composer that was whose hair was particularly crazy—or maybe of a cartoon showing a guy who'd stuck his finger in a light socket.
But for Willie, the worst thing about how Mr. Miller looked was the desperate scowl on his face. Somehow that look seemed to scream at Willie. He thought he knew exactly how the poor damned man felt.
He knew what Mr. Miller was feeling. He was feeling anger, resentment, fear and absolute despair.
Willie felt certain he recognized it all. He felt sure of it, because it was the same way he'd felt himself, when Barnabas Collins first made a slave of Willie Loomis.
"Come on in, Mr. Miller," Willie said, stepping out of the poor guy's way. "Welcome back."
The scowling Mr. Miller ignored him. He stomped straight into the parlor and halted a few feet from Angelique, who was still standing at the window.
"You're the one who brought me here," Mr. Miller accused the witch. His voice was thick with hatred. "You're the one who did this to me. Why?"
She acknowledged his statement with a nod of her head and a gracious smile. "Yes, Mr. Miller," she told him, "or, I should say, Mr. Stiles. I am the one who brought you here. Now, sit down there," she said, gesturing to the chair that Willie had brought into the room, "and I'll explain to you what you need to know."
Mr. Miller sat where she'd ordered. Willie guessed he probably didn't have much choice. They still needed to keep Barnabas' chair sacred, and Willie sure didn't feel it was his place to squeeze onto the loveseat beside Angelique—he wasn't sure he wanted to get that close to her, anyway. So he brought in another dining room chair and took a seat on it. Julia, meanwhile, came back downstairs and made her way to her usual chair, curiously eyeing Mr. Miller and the witch.
"Mr. Stiles," Angelique began coldly. "You may not be aware of the fact that last night, the ghost of a certain warlock murdered five people at Collinwood."
Willie was looking at Mr. Miller—or Mr. Stiles—when Angelique said that. He saw the man wince before asking hoarsely, "Who?"
"Barnabas Collins, Elizabeth Collins Malloy, David Collins and Hallie Stokes—and, I suppose, also Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes—and a young woman by the name of Daphne."
Mr. Miller still scowled, and Willie had the feeling he was using that scowl to keep any other emotions from showing on his face. "I'm sorry," Miller said combatively. "Did you bring me all the way back here just to hear me say that?"
"No," answered Angelique. "I brought you back so you can help me set to rights the disaster which you helped to cause."
Miller demanded, "What are you talking about?"
Yeah, Willie wondered, what are you talking about?
Smiling calmly, she said, "As you may have gathered from the way in which I brought you here, I am a witch. I also have a longstanding interest in the Collins family. I object to some other power having his way with them, as this warlock has done. I do not intend to let him get away with it."
"Good," Miller snarled. "More power to you, madam; you may crush the bastard with my blessing, and I wish you joy of it. But why do you need me here in order to do that?"
"Because," smiled the witch, "it is not my intention simply to crush the bastard. I intend to go back in time, to stop him at the point at which this campaign of his began. I am going to stop this disaster from ever taking place."
Damn, Willie thought, the drama around this place sure beats any TV show ever made! He was fascinated, watching the conversation of the witch and the former ghost. Right now the way they were looking at each other reminded him of some nature film he'd seen about a mongoose fighting a snake. Only if Mr. Miller was the mongoose, Willie figured that this time the mongoose would get the worst of it. A glimpse of fear appeared on the ex-ghost's face before he once again managed to hide it behind his anger. "All right," Miller said, "but why do you need me?"
"Because you, Mr. Stiles, are one of the cornerstones of this edifice. It was your body the warlock used when he began this campaign of destruction—"
Miller yelled suddenly, "That's not my fault!"
Angelique went on, "Maybe it is your fault; maybe it isn't. But I will tell you one thing that is your fault. Last night, you ran away. You ran away to save yourself, making no attempt to help the people who died in your place. You ran away, and in his rage at losing your precious body, the warlock set loose his fury, and he killed—people who were important to me. I am not going to let him get away with it. And I won't let you get away with it, either."
"I couldn't have helped them!"
"You could have tried," said the witch. "But that doesn't matter, now. I am going to give you another chance. And this time you will do your best to help, whether you want to, or not. You will do your best to undo the evil that caught you up in its clutches in 1840. You will fight to protect all of the people you failed to help, both last night and in 1840. And if you do not give your all to defend those people, then you will answer to me. And believe me, Mr. Stiles: my anger is every bit as much to be feared as the anger of your friend the warlock."
It seemed to Willie an insanely long time that Mr. Miller stared at her, before the man finally whispered, "I believe you."
"Good," said Angelique briskly. "Then let's get on with this." She stood up, and Miller reluctantly got to his feet as well. Willie and Julia followed. Willie looked over at Julia and mouthed, "What now?" to which Julia helplessly shrugged.
Angelique declared, "Quite apart from all the meaningful things I said just now about you needing to undo the evil you helped cause, there is a practical reason why you are the one to help me. Of all of us available now to fight the warlock, only you and I were alive in 1840. That means we are the ones who must travel there now."
Mr. Miller frowned and finally muttered, "I don't understand."
Willie thought, I know just how you feel, pal.
"Julia," said Angelique, "the I Ching wands are still here, aren't they?"
"Yes," Julia answered. "They're right here." She hurried over to Barnabas' secretary.
The witch explained to her unwilling partner, "You and I are going to travel back in time. The method we will use requires that our souls in this time possess our bodies in the past. I'm sorry," she added, her smile filled with irony, "I understand that possession must be a painful topic for you to contemplate. But if it makes you feel better, it should be less of a violation to be possessed by yourself, than by anyone else.
"You and I are going to 1840, because both of us were alive then, and thus we have bodies to possess. I was using the name Valerie then," she went on, "so that is the name you will use for me. And … in order to give me a cover story, we'll say that I am your sister. Try to remember that, won't you?" she asked with a mocking smile. "When we meet each other again in 1840, do try to recall that I'm your loving sister, Valerie Stiles."
Mr. Miller muttered, "This is insane."
"I'm sure it's not much more insane than your life and your afterlife have been, for these past 130 years. Think about it. You have the chance to set things right, dear brother. Few people ever truly have that chance. Isn't the chance to make amends for your mistakes—and to destroy the one who once destroyed you—isn't that chance worth a little insanity?"
Crossing his arms on his chest and scowling bitterly at the witch, Miller said, "I can't get out of helping you, whether I think it's worth doing or not."
"You're right. You can't get out of it."
Over by the secretary, Julia stood holding the I Ching wands, wrapped in a big cloth napkin. Willie thought suddenly about the weird connectedness of all of this. He realized that was probably the original napkin in which Quentin had wrapped the wands, when he stored them in his room at Collinwood back in 1897.
Going back to planning logistics, Angelique said, "The basement is the logical place in which to do this. Is there a table down there?"
"Yes," said Julia. "It's still there from … the last time Barnabas did this."
"Good. And chairs?"
Willie put in, "There's one down there," and he picked up the chair he'd just been sitting in. "I'll bring this one down with us."
"Then I think we have no reason to delay."
Julia carefully handed the I Ching wands to Angelique. Then she lit the four candles in the candelabra sitting on the sideboard in the hallway. She unlocked the basement door and then she led the way, candelabra held high. The unhappy Mr. Miller followed her. After him, walked the witch. Lugging the dining room chair, Willie brought up the rear.
He had only gone a couple of steps downstairs before he thought, Aw, crap. Barnabas' coffin is still down here. That means Mr. Miller will see it.
He saw it. When Willie reached the basement, the former ghost was standing in the center of the room, staring at the coffin. He muttered, "What in the …?"
"Don't let it worry you, Mr. Stiles," said Angelique, "it has nothing to do with you. It won't be there in 1840, so you don't need to think about it."
Willie set the chair at one side of the table, and went and fetched the other chair from the recess where it had been stashed. Julia, meanwhile, was fretting. She asked Angelique, "How confident are you that this will work? If Mr. … Stiles is resisting, and doesn't want to be part of this, could that stop the entire process from succeeding?"
"It certainly wouldn't help," the witch answered, with a malicious smile at her unwilling companion. "But I trust in Mr. Stiles' self-interest. I trust him to understand that he has a better chance for a favorable outcome by doing what I require of him and journeying with me to 1840, than by causing us to fail and facing my anger."
The man under discussion snapped, "I take your point, madam. I presume I am as ready for this as I will ever be. Shall we get on with it?"
"Very gladly. Then first, dear brother, you must stand opposite me, at the other side of the table."
It occurred to Willie that Angelique kept using that "dear brother" phrase solely for the sake of annoying her traveling companion. In that moment, he felt genuinely sorry for Mr. Miller.
Willie thought, I sure as heck wouldn't want to go time-traveling with Angelique!
When the two of them were standing at either side of the small table, Angelique unwrapped the wands and handed the napkin to Julia. She asked, "You were with Barnabas when he did this?"
Julia nodded. "Yes, when he tried to contact Quentin's ghost and instead the I Ching took him to 1897. Professor Stokes and I were both with him. Stokes was the one who talked him through it and helped him understand what to do."
"Then you understand that you and Mr. Loomis must both stay absolutely silent. You must say nothing, do nothing, to interrupt us once we begin."
"Yes," said Julia. "I understand." She cast a "You've got that?" look at Willie.
"Yeah," Willie answered. "I won't make a peep."
Angelique turned to face the ex-ghost. "Depending on precisely where the currents of time carry us, I may not be able to join you immediately. I did visit Collinsport in the autumn of 1840, but we can't know how far from there my body may be when I possess it. You must simply do your best not to let the warlock possess you before I reach you." She added with a teasing smile, "Remember not to put on any gold, jeweled masks."
"Believe me," Mr. Miller told her grimly, "I'll remember." He looked at the witch with a challenge in his eyes, and asked, "What do we have to do?"
Willie thought that Angelique probably liked this man better when he challenged her. It probably led her to respect him more. She didn't seem to be teasing any longer when she held out her hand and the six I Ching wands that lay within it.
She said, "Place your hand over mine. Both of us must hold the wands. When the time comes, we will throw the wands together, onto the table. Until then … do your best to empty your mind. Empty it of everything except for the time we must reach. Take us in your thoughts to where you were, a few days before the warlock possessed you. Think of it, until your thoughts themselves have almost strength enough to take us there."
Willie didn't know how Angelique could tell when her time-travel-partner's thoughts were almost strong enough to take them there. Maybe she just guessed. Whether she knew or guessed, a minute or so later she hissed out, "Throw the wands, now!"
Their hands moving together, the two of them cast the wands onto the table. Willie wouldn't have known the proper hexagram from a hole in the ground, but Julia, standing next to him, breathed in sharply and whispered, "That's it. The 49th Hexagram. The Hexagram of Change."
As the rest of them stood and watched, Angelique arranged the wands into a neat rectangle on the table. Willie gulped as he looked at it. He wondered, How the heck does this work, anyway? Why does everyone who needs to time-travel get the Hexagram of Change? Does the I Ching just know when people need to travel through time, and so it brings them that hexagram?
I guess we'd all be SOL if they got some other hexagram. Like, I don't know, like the Hexagram of Sitting Around Thinking Deeply.
"Take a seat, Mr. Stiles," Angelique said quietly. "We must take the next steps." The two of them sat opposite each other, and the witch's instructions continued. "Take my hands," she told him, reaching her hands across the table, "and keep hold of them. Now … look at the hexagram. Look at it until you see nothing else. Look until you can perfectly re-create that pattern in your mind. Now, close your eyes. Do you see it still?"
"Yes," the man whispered. "I still see it."
"Good. Do not lose sight of it. And now, picture in your mind a door, with that same pattern upon it. Keep seeing that door, watching it. Do not let your mind slip away from it. Tell me when you see it, Mr. Stiles. Tell me when you see the door."
Willie thought, I'm going to go crazy just from watching this! He felt like shaking Mr. Miller and yelling at him, "See the door, already!" Then finally, finally, the man said, with his eyes still closed, "I see the door."
"Yes," Angelique murmured. "Yes. So do I. Keep watching the door. Watch the door until you see it open away from you. And when you see the door open, let your spirit walk through it. Walk through the door."
Willie and Julia stood watching them—watching two people who were sitting at a table with their eyes closed, without moving or speaking or doing anything.
Willie thought, This is nuts. How are we ever gonna know when they've "walked through the door?"
How can anyone tell the difference between people whose souls have walked through a door, and people whose souls are waiting to walk through?
Willie didn't know how many minutes they stood there watching. Once he heard Mr. Miller give a little gasp. He thought, Maybe he just walked through? Please? He wasn't sure there was even that much of a sign from Angelique. Only, a short time after Mr. Miller had gasped, she lifted her chin slightly higher. After that, he didn't see her move again.
Willie finally glanced questioningly at Julia, and nodded his head toward the stairs. She nodded agreement, and led the way in tiptoeing upstairs.
"Damn," muttered Willie, as they reached the parlor. He slumped down on the loveseat and Julia sank into her usual chair. "Damn, Julia, I never knew how tough it is to just be quiet. It's a hell of a thing, ain't it—thinking you're gonna send a person into some abyss outside time and space, if you shuffle your feet or yawn or let a fart!"
"Willie," Dr. Hoffman groaned, leaning forward and putting her face in her hands. She made a sort of hysterical giggling sound; then she said, "Oh, God. I don't know if I'm laughing or crying."
Willie muttered, "I feel like it all happened so fast. I mean, I know it didn't—I know it took all day …" He looked over his shoulder, out the window, and saw that, indeed, the sun was setting. He winced as he realized that, when he had noticed the sunset, he'd automatically started listening for Barnabas. He expected to hear Barnabas walking upstairs from the basement.
"But, still …" he went on, "I know it wasn't fast, but I still feel like it gave me whiplash. I mean, at noon we thought Barnabas and the rest of them were gone, and there wasn't any kind of hope. And now … now there is some kind of hope." Julia didn't say anything right away, and Willie asked her, feeling suddenly scared, "There is some kind of hope, now, Julia, isn't there?"
"Yes," Julia whispered. "Yes, Willie, there must be." She told him, "When Barnabas first used the I Ching, Stokes told him he had only one chance in a million to make it work. But Barnabas tried, and later I did … and both of us succeeded. It didn't work the way either of us thought it would. But it did work."
"Yeah," sighed Willie. "And this time we've got Madam Napoleon on the case, and 'Impossible isn't French.'"
Through the ceiling above them, both of them suddenly heard running footsteps overhead. Muffled by distance but still clear enough to understand, Willie heard a voice that had to be Quentin's, shouting, "Daphne? Daphne, where are you?"
"Oh, man," Willie groaned, as he and Julia both jumped up and ran for the staircase. "Here we go again." As the two of them raced up the stairs, Willie said, "I guess we aren't leaving for Windcliff after all, are we? Since now we gotta protect those two in the basement."
"No, that's true," answered Julia, "I guess we aren't." She smiled at Willie as they paused for a moment on the landing. "It'll be a 24/7 job—stopping Quentin from hurting himself or his portrait, and making sure nothing disturbs those two in the basement."
"Yeah," said Willie. "Is this job weirder or less weird than being a vampire's valet?"
Julia smiled again and shrugged. Then she hurried onward in the direction of Quentin's voice. Somewhere down the hall ahead of them, he was still calling plaintively, "Daphne?"
As he followed her, Willie thought, Quentin and Carolyn are crazy, Barnabas, Elizabeth and the kids are dead, there's an evil murdering ghost-warlock next door, and a witch and an ex-ghost are sitting in an I-Ching trance in the basement. And I'm happy.
I'm happy because we've got hope again.
We've got hope, and that's how we'll keep on going.