In Darkness
A Dark Shadows 1970/1840 Fanfiction
Chapter Five
The man appeared from thin air, right in front of David Collins' eyes.
David was sitting on the floor and leaning against the front wall in the dollhouse's upstairs parlor. Hallie, too, was seated on the floor. She was sitting in the same place where she'd sat for almost the entire time, ever since the horrible moment when they found themselves inside the dolls' house.
Hallie was sitting against the room's interior wall, next to the sideboard, staring down at her hands. The pose in which Hallie was sitting, with her legs to one side, reminded David of a statue he'd once seen in a magazine photograph—a "Little Mermaid" statue on a rock, in the harbor of some town in Denmark.
David didn't give a hoot about the little mermaid. He'd never thought he cared much about Denmark before, either. But now he desperately wished that he could go there. He wished he could go anywhere. Knowing that now he couldn't go see that statue in Denmark if he wanted to—that now he couldn't go anywhere—made him feel like breaking down in tears. Or maybe like breaking the dollhouse's few pathetic pieces of furniture.
He didn't actually know if he could break the furniture. He hadn't tried it yet. He guessed maybe he would try it, sometime, for no better reason than the fact that he would need to do something. He couldn't spend eternity just doing nothing at all.
He thought that probably he and Hallie couldn't break the furniture—at least not the actual, solid doll's house furniture that existed in the real world. How could they, when they were only spirits themselves, and the furniture was real?
Maybe they could break the spirit version of the furniture.
He looked at his watch again. It was almost time to finish drawing his first day's mark on the wall.
David had looked at his watch a few minutes after they first arrived in the dolls' house. When he looked, he had seen that it read 8:38. He had been religiously winding his watch a few turns every couple of hours, ever since then.
He couldn't stand to think of his watch stopping. He had the feeling that if his watched stopped, he would lose his last remaining connection to the real, living world.
This was, of course, assuming that the time on his watch was the same as the real time, outside.
He felt determined to believe that it was. He thought if he didn't have that one tiny connection, then he really was going to lose his mind.
David asked himself, If I'm already thinking about going crazy when we haven't even been here 24 hours, what's it going to be like when we've been here for months? For years?
Forever?
He'd been staring at his watch when 8:38 rolled around that morning. When it had, he'd taken the pencil stub out of his pocket and drawn about an inch-tall line on the ugly faded lilac-colored wallpaper, at the level of his eyes and to his right of the spindly little grandfather clock. When it got to be 8:38 p.m., he would add another inch to the height of his mark, to show that the first whole day had passed.
At least, he was assuming that he'd made that first mark on the wall at 8:38 in the morning. It had to have been, presuming that what he saw on his watch had anything to do with reality. He couldn't have told that it was morning based on anything else he could see. The light around them seemed the same as always. The inside of the dolls' house was brightly lit, though they had no idea where the light was coming from. Sighing, David remembered when he and Hallie had first noticed the mysterious light in the dollhouse, when they were still real people, gazing into the toy Rose Cottage from outside.
"Outside" was a dimension they couldn't see at all, now. Where the fourth wall of the house should have been—the side of the dollhouse that in real life was open for kids to reach into it and play—there was a strange sort of pearly mist. Sometimes the mist looked gray, sometimes it looked a faint blue. Sometimes it seemed almost lilac, like Rose Cottage's wallpaper. When they'd first arrived, David had tried to stick his hand into it, despite Hallie gasping out, "No, David, don't!"
His hand hadn't gone anywhere. It was simply stopped by the mist, as solidly as though another wall was standing there. Only David hadn't felt it. Even though his hand couldn't move farther, it felt as though he wasn't touching anything at all.
The mist of the fourth wall seemed to be outside the dollhouse windows, too. He hadn't yet seen darkness or daylight beyond those windows, and he guessed that he never would. Outside the windows was only the faint, awful light of that gray-blue-purple mist.
"I wish you wouldn't keep looking at your watch," Hallie's voice sounded flatly. "It isn't going to change anything."
"I've got to do something," David answered back.
"Do you?"
"You don't have to look at me looking at my watch. There are other rooms in this place. You could go sit in one of them."
"You could go sit in one of them."
"I'm not the one who's complaining! If you don't want to watch me looking at my watch, why don't you go where you can't see me?"
She looked at him angrily for an instant, then her head slumped down again and she went back to staring at her hands.
"I'm sorry, David," Hallie murmured. "We shouldn't be fighting already. It's not going to be a good eternity if we're already fighting."
Hallie was the first one who had used the word "eternity" about their existence in the dolls' house. Ever since she had said it, David hadn't been able to get it out of his mind.
When they'd first arrived inside the toy version of Rose Cottage, they had searched all through it for some way of getting out. They had tried to open all of the upstairs windows. Of course not a one of them had budged. Together, holding hands, they had made their way down the narrow little staircase at the center of the house.
The downstairs windows were as immovable as those upstairs. The door just as stubbornly refused to open. David wondered if the door on the real dollhouse even moved at all, or if it was only painted on.
After they had made their first—and so far, their only—exploration of the house, Hallie had said to David, "If we're here, that's because Carrie and Tad are living in our bodies now. Isn't it?"
"I … guess that's right," he'd said.
"Then if we're here, and they're alive in our bodies, do you think it means we're dead?"
He didn't want to say it, but he couldn't think of any better explanation. "Well … yes. I guess we are."
Hallie didn't say anything to that. She just walked back upstairs, back into the parlor, and sat down there on the floor next to the sideboard.
David followed her. He sat in one of the chairs at the round table, waiting for her to say something more, or even just to look at him. Finally, she did look up, with sullen, angry eyes.
"Why are you looking at me?" she'd asked.
"I don't know, I thought we were having a conversation."
"What a great conversation!" Hallie had snapped. "'Do you think we're dead?' 'Yes, I think we're dead.' 'Oh, groovy, so we get to spend all eternity in a dolls' house.'"
Even though she claimed not to want to talk, Hallie's words had now suddenly rushed on. "I used to want to die, David! I used to want to die so I could be with my mother and father again. For the first couple of months after the accident, that's the only thing I wanted. And now I am dead, but I still can't be with them. Because my mother and father's souls have gone wherever it is people's souls are supposed to go, but our souls haven't, because Gerard and Daphne have trapped us in this dollhouse!"
Feeling like he had to say something to comfort her—even if he didn't believe in what he was saying—David said lamely, "Maybe we'll get out of here someday."
Hallie looked up at him with a smile so bitter it scared him. "Yeah," she had sneered. "Maybe."
And now here it was, 8:03 at night the most recent time he'd looked at his watch. Only another 35 minutes to wait before he could finish his first day's line on the wall.
He wanted to look at his watch again already, but he decided not to. He didn't want Hallie to notice that and blow up at him about it.
David's guess was that spirits—or whatever he and Hallie were now—didn't sleep. He hadn't felt sleepy at all in the entire time they'd been here. That was too bad, he thought, since sleeping could help to pass the time.
Only maybe that was a terrible idea. Maybe he should be glad they didn't need to sleep.
If he slept, he might not wind his watch often enough. He might lose track of the time.
And he might dream.
He didn't want to be sitting here, a disembodied spirit in a dollhouse. But he was pretty darned sure that it was much, much better to be sitting here awake, than to deal with whatever dreams might come to him if he were sleeping.
At least the dolls weren't in here with them. Or if they were, he and Hallie couldn't see them. He wasn't certain why that was. Maybe it was because the dolls that used to sit at the parlor table had represented Hallie and him? Maybe the dolls couldn't be here now, because David and Hallie were here instead?
Anyway, he was glad they weren't. If those nasty, creepy dolls had been in here, with their little beady eyes and the girl doll's messed-up hair, he would have spent all his time imagining that the dolls were looking at him.
And the doll he and Hallie had made to represent Leticia would have been even worse. For a moment he imagined what it would be like if a giant clothes-pin doll was in here, as tall as him, smiling at him crazily from its magic-markered face. He knew he would have to drag all three dolls out of the parlor, and leave them somewhere as far away from him as possible. But he also knew that he would still imagine they were watching him.
For probably the thousandth time, David stuck his hands in his jeans pockets and felt the mostly useless collection of stuff he had in them.
His pencil stub. His pocket knife, which at least would be good for sharpening the pencil. Maybe for whittling with, too, if he found out that he could actually have a physical effect on the dolls' house furniture. A marble—Which is a stupid thing to carry around, he told himself; what's the good of hauling around one dumb marble? If you had a whole set of marbles, that'd be worth something; maybe you and Hallie would eventually become marbles champions. Two quarters, a nickel and three pennies. A couple of little shells he'd picked up on the beach, a water-worn bit of wood that he'd thought looked kind of like a bird, a blue jay's feather—and in one of his back pockets, a deck of cards.
He hadn't brought out the card deck yet, or mentioned it to Hallie. He didn't want her to start sneering at him about how playing cards wasn't going to make it up to her for being stuck here with him for eternity. But he felt fiercely glad that he had the cards. Maybe, he thought, they might keep him from going insane.
It was a good thing his Aunt Elizabeth had taught him to play several different types of solitaire.
That was what David was thinking when he saw the man appear, standing by the wall of lilac-colored mist.
He was a young man whose hair was big enough that it almost qualified as an Afro. He was wearing a light yellow shirt and khaki slacks, and the first thing which struck David about the man's clothing was, Those clothes look like they belong to my father. Then he told himself it was stupid of him to think that. All pale yellow shirts and pairs of khaki slacks had to look pretty much the same.
Then David recognized the young man's face. He jumped to his feet, feeling suddenly sick with fear.
Hallie must have recognized the man in that same instant. She also scrambled to her feet, rushed over to David's side and grabbed his hand. As she did so, she was pleading, "Gerard! Don't hurt us. We're not doing anything. We're just staying here like you want us to, please …"
Gerard had a look on his face which David had never seen there before. He didn't look like his evil, terrifying self. He did look angry, maybe. But somehow it seemed like a different sort of anger than what David expected from him. For some reason it seemed as though Gerard wasn't angry at them. He looked angry at himself.
"I'm not going to hurt you," Gerard said. His voice sounded flat and miserable. "You don't need to be afraid of me. I'm not Gerard—" at that, he shook his head, and impatiently interrupted himself. "I am Gerard, but I'm not the one you think. I'm not the one who put you here."
David and Hallie looked at each other in confusion. David squeezed Hallie's hand. At least this weirdo's arrival meant that, for the moment, she wasn't mad at him. He asked, "What do you mean?"
Instead of answering that question, Gerard—or whoever he was—asked in tired-sounding tones, "You're David and Hallie?"
"Yes," Hallie whispered. "Do you know what's happened to us?"
"The one whom you know as Gerard compelled the ghosts of Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes to possess you. Now they're living in your bodies and you are trapped here. Just the same as I am."
"So …" David began, "the ghost of Gerard looks like you, the way Tad and Carrie look like us? And now … now his ghost has possessed your body, just like they've possessed ours?"
The man opened his mouth to answer that, then clearly changed his mind. "That explanation is close enough," he said. "It probably makes more sense than the real story."
For the first time, he seemed to notice their surroundings. A strange, bitter grimace twisted his mouth. "God," he said. "We're inside of the dolls' house." Looking at David and Hallie again, he asked, "I suppose you have tried to get out of here?"
"Yes," answered Hallie. "None of the windows will open, or the door."
"No," said the man. "No, they wouldn't." With another grimacing, sour smile, he told them, "It may not look like much, but believe me: this is a villa on the Champs-Élysées compared with being stuck inside a warlock's severed head."
David and Hallie both gaped at him on that. David began to ask him again, "What do you mean—"
Then Hallie cried out, "What's happening to him?"
For an instant the young man completely faded out of sight. Then he was back again, but now he looked transparent—the way ghosts were supposed to look, but the way that, in David's experience, they very seldom did.
He kept wavering in and out: one instant more visible to them; the next instant, nearly gone. He flung back his head. He seemed to be gazing at something, and listening to something David and Hallie couldn't hear.
A look of joy transfigured the young man's face. He gave a sobbing cry, "Oh, God! Oh, thank God!"
In that same moment, the realization hit David and Hallie that their only companion was leaving them.
Hallie dropped David's hand. She sprang toward the man, pleading, "No, don't leave us!"
David ran at him, too, adding his own cry, "Take us with you!"
The man was still there enough to be able to see and hear them. He recoiled from them. His expression was now the expression of a cornered wolf.
"Don't touch me!" the man snarled at them. "Keep away from me!"
He faded again; now David could barely see him at all. Making one last try to get through to him, David begged, "Please help us!"
The young man had already vanished when they heard a last shout come back to them, "I'm sorry!"
David and Hallie stood there, waiting. The man who might or might not have been Gerard did not appear again.
"He didn't even try to help us," David heard himself saying.
Hallie looked at him with her expression which proclaimed that she was older, wiser and infinitely more experienced with the cruelties of life than he was. She asked, "Did you expect him to?"
"I don't know," David sighed. "Maybe I did."
Hallie sat down again. This time, he was relieved to see, she sat in a chair, not her usual place on the floor.
Maybe that was a good sign. Maybe it meant they weren't going to spend all of eternity with her just sitting in that one spot, disdaining to have anything to do with him.
David sat down in another of the chairs by the little round table, trying to find some reason to still feel hopeful.
"Maybe he can help us from outside," he suggested. "Or get someone else to help us. Since now he knows we're in here, maybe he'll tell people about it. Maybe Dr. Hoffman, or Barnabas, or your uncle …"
She was casting him that scornful, pitying look again, and David decided that he really hated it. Then she turned away and gazed toward the wall of lilac mist.
The next thing she said to him was something he could never have predicted. Hallie asked, "Did you ever see Peter Pan? On stage, I mean; not the cartoon."
"Sure," David answered, surprised. "A couple of years ago. Vicki and Aunt Elizabeth and I went to see it in Bangor."
Hallie's voice was very quiet now, the voice of remembering. She told him, "It was the school play at my school last Christmas. When my parents were still alive. It was the last show they came to see me in."
"Yeah?" David asked. It was news to him that Hallie had ever acted in school plays. She almost never talked about her life before her parents died. "I bet you played Wendy."
She turned a brief glance on him, but her expression wasn't angry. Instead she gave a little, rueful smile before looking away.
"You really don't know me very well, David, do you? You think I'd ever want to be on stage in front of all those people?"
"But you said …"
"I was the lighting operator," she said, with a note of pride in her voice. "That's what I did for all our school plays. So in Peter Pan, that means that I was Tinkerbell."
David tried to think of something to say to that, but Hallie was already going on.
"You know that part in the end, when Tinkerbell is dying and the audience has to clap to bring her back to life?"
"Yeah," David said. He suddenly felt a lump in his throat, remembering himself, Vicki and Aunt Elizabeth sitting together in the theater, clapping like crazy along with everybody else.
"I got such a kick out of that part: making the spotlight flicker and get dim, and then slowly turning it up brighter, when all the kids were clapping and Peter and Wendy were saying, 'Do you believe in fairies?'
"Only, you know something, David? Even then, even when my parents were still alive, I wasn't sure if it was sweet and nice, or … wrong."
"Wrong?" David repeated. He turned to look at her. "What do you mean, wrong?"
She was smiling at him; a smile so sad that David thought it looked unbelievably creepy.
"All those people clapping," she said. "All those people clapping their hearts out and saying they believe in fairies. And all the time, it wasn't even a fairy. It was just me, turning the spotlight on and off."
"Well, sure, but—"
"And everybody in the theater wants to believe it," she pressed on. "We want to believe we can just clap, and say we believe, and someone will come back to life. But they won't. They can't. No matter how loudly we say we believe. No matter how hard we clap."
David looked at her face and wished that she would stop smiling. "So do you really believe, David?" she asked him. "Do you really believe someone is going to save us?"
"Maybe," he asserted combatively. "Why shouldn't I? Where's the harm in it?"
Now Hallie wasn't smiling anymore. She said, "If you don't believe, it won't hurt you so much when it doesn't happen."
She turned again to stare at the fourth wall of mist.
David swallowed. His eyes were suddenly stinging.
He looked at his watch. It read 8:16.
Twenty-two minutes, he thought. Twenty-two more minutes, and I can finish my mark on the wall for our first day.
