Author's Note
My interpretation of the "carriage house building complex" in this chapter is based on the stables, barn and related service buildings at the Lyndhurst Estate in Tarrytown, New York. These were used as the location for exteriors of the Collinwood estate that appeared in early episodes of Dark Shadows, such as the apartment lived in by Matthew Morgan (later referred to on the show as "the cottage"), and the carriage house in which the Collins family's cars are parked. Anyone not familiar with those buildings who wants to get a feel for them can easily find photos through image searches such as "Lyndhurst Mansion carriage house." Of course, I recommend that any Dark Shadows fan who has not watched the early, pre-Barnabas episodes, should do so as soon as possible! It's my belief that familiarity with the first year or so of episodes greatly deepens one's appreciation of the rest of the show.
In Darkness
A Dark Shadows 1970/1840 Fanfiction
Chapter Six
Here I am again, thought Burke Devlin. Sneaking around Collinwood looking for ghosts.
Except that his current expedition really couldn't be described as "sneaking." He had stopped by the main house and talked with Mrs. Johnson, and she had loaned him a set of keys to the buildings in the carriage house complex. Absolutely no sneaking was involved, with the result that this visit bore almost no resemblance to his first Collinwood ghost-hunt.
On that occasion the ten-year-old Burke had climbed some ivy on the west wing, reached a little balcony that he'd noticed had a broken window next to it, stuck his hand through the gap in the glass and unlatched the window, and then spent an hour or so creeping along the corridors of the deserted west wing by the pale glow of his dad's flashlight. The scariest things that had happened to him in connection with that ghost-hunt had been Hanscomb the butler looming in his path and demanding to know what he was up to, and then his dad turning Burke over his knee and administering one of those spankings that made him try to avoid sitting down for a few days afterward.
At least Dad believed me when I told him the window was already broken. If he thought I was literally guilty of breaking and entering, he'd probably have beat me so hard I'd have wound up in the hospital.
For all those years after he'd failed to find any ghosts as a ten-year-old, he'd assumed that Collinwood's ghosts weren't real. When he had come back here in 1966, he'd believed the ghosts of the great house were all of the metaphorical kind: the dark, dirty secrets; the skeletons in closets.
Now, if everything he'd been told was true, it seemed that the place was lousy with ghosts, after all. For all he knew, the Collinses probably had literal skeletons in some of their closets. They certainly seemed to have no shortage of vengeful spirits trying to take over Collinwood and destroy the whole Collins family.
Wryly Burke thought, I thought I was such a big shot when I first got back into town. Big, bad Burke Devlin, here to unearth the Collinses' guilty secrets and dismantle their empire in my beautifully-crafted revenge.
Little did I know there was a crowd ahead of me already waiting to do that! All those vengeful ghosts and decapitated warlocks probably just sneered when I turned up. If I could've heard them, they were probably telling me to take a number and wait in line.
It was still difficult for Burke to believe in all the crazy-sounding things that had happened here in Collinsport between October 1967 and April 1970—those two-and-a-half years in which he had lived amnesiac in a Brazilian jungle.
Of course, he admitted to himself, that is pretty crazy-sounding, too. You don't have too much of a leg to stand on, complaining about things being unbelievable.
Still, he argued, there's crazy-sounding and then there's crazy-sounding. Surviving a plane crash and living with amnesia in the jungle is a different kettle of fish from traveling through time, living in a parallel time band, and fighting an alien monster-cult who murder people with some kind of acid slime and worship a room that breathes on the top floor of an antique shop!
And then there was the vampire.
He reached into his jacket pocket and clutched the crucifix he always carried with him now—the crucifix being a souvenir of his time in Brazil. He wondered if the real reason he was out here again tonight, looking for Daphne Harridge the supposed ex-ghost, was because he hoped instead to run into the vampire—the bloodsucking bastard who'd been making Vicki's life hell.
He did believe in the literal existence of vampires, now. He had seen so much evidence of their existence that he figured it would be stupid of him not to believe.
With hindsight, it was pretty clear that a vampire had victimized poor Maggie back in 1967. And it was all too damned obvious that a vampire was after Vicki now—what with the bleeding puncture wounds in her neck and the hypnotic power that something exercised over her, summoning her out into the forest night after night.
So vampires are real, Burke Devlin told himself. So is there any reason why time-travel, Parallel Time and alien, murdering slime-monsters—not to mention ghosts who come back to life and revenge-seeking body-hopping warlocks—shouldn't be real, too?
He did believe in the time-travel—mostly. It was a big jump for his mind to take, accepting the truth of something so patently nuts. But it was Bill Malloy who had been through that first bout of time-travel at Collinwood; solid, reliable, firmly-grounded-in-reality Bill Malloy. Bill, his old friend and mentor, the man who had given the teenaged Burke Devlin his first real job.
If Bill said he'd spent four months living in the 18th century, then he had. And if he had, then presumably Barnabas and Julia had really made their trip to the 19th century, too, and probably they'd spent a while living in a parallel band of time, and they'd probably traveled to the future, and there probably was an evil ghost who wanted to raze Collinwood to the ground and destroy every person who bore Collins blood in their veins, and anybody else who tried to help them. And there probably really was, hiding around here somewhere, a young woman named Daphne who was actually a former ghost brought back to life.
Burke and Quentin had spent several hours searching for her that afternoon, focusing on the empty houses on the Collins property: the McGruder Place which was apparently also Rose Cottage, and Seaview, the house that Burke still hoped to someday purchase as the home he would share with Vicki—if Vicki decided to marry him instead of marrying Frank Garner.
He and Quentin had found no sign that anyone was using either house as their base of operations. They'd encountered only birds inside Rose Cottage, and had seen a few squirrels and a family of deer out in the woods. The only peril they'd run into was some rotten floorboards here and there around Rose Cottage, which had led to a bit of hopping around in pain and some choice language from both of them.
After those hours of playing The Hardy Boys with Quentin, Burke had gone back into town to make some business phone calls and have dinner. Or rather, he had told Quentin that he had some business calls to make; and he did, in fact, make them. But the one call he truly cared about was the incoming one that came at 5:00—the call from Vicki.
When Vicki had left with Frank Garner that morning she had still been horribly weak; almost too weak to walk down the stairs and out through Collinwood's front door. Her voice had been the faintest of whispers. But she'd managed a smile for him and had squeezed his hand, and she had made a date to phone him at 5:00 that evening.
Her call had come in right on time, and her voice over the telephone sounded amazingly better. She sounded bright and alert; almost her old self. She'd told him how much better she was: "I feel almost fine again, Burke. It's so hard to believe that yesterday I was too weak to get out of bed. I'm embarrassed that all of you had to go through so much trouble for me. I almost feel like I'm well enough to come back to Collinsport already—"
"No, Vicki," he had broken in then. "You can't do that. Promise me you'll stay in Bangor. You can't come back to Collinsport until we've taken care of some things here. Until we've made certain you won't get sick like that again."
Burke had talked with Frank at the end of the phone call, and warned him to be on guard against Vicki trying to return to Collinsport.
"Don't worry," Frank had promised him. "I've got my dad and his housekeeper enlisted to help; we're not letting Vicki out of this house without me. Dad probably thinks I've gone nuts, but we can count on him anyway. He wasn't thrilled about me hanging crosses in all the windows and above the doors. I think he's still trying to work out if I've developed a religious mania or if I'm filming a home-movie version of Dracula."
Burke had grinned at that and asked, "Where did you get all the crosses?"
"At the Catholic bookstore in town; I think I bought up their whole supply. Burke," the young man had continued, "you be careful, will you? You know the monster who did this to her is still out there."
"I know," Burke had said. "I'll be careful."
Vicki's safe, Burke told himself now.
She's safe, or as safe as we can make her.
And that, of course, was the problem. They didn't know if "as safe as we can make her" would be safe enough.
Burke wondered if the vampire who had done this to Vicki was the same one who'd tormented Maggie three years ago. From what Burke had been told, the vampire-like attacks on animals and people hadn't gone on consistently for those three years, although now and then there were isolated incidents which seemed similar to the series of assaults in 1967.
If it is the same vampire, Burke thought, maybe those times when there were no attacks are times when he'd left town. And if the vampire can leave town, he can go to Bangor after Vicki.
He sighed, grimaced and told himself to focus on searching for Daphne the ex-ghost.
Since he and Quentin had already searched the abandoned houses on the estate, he figured the next logical place to look was the carriage house complex. In fact, maybe they should have searched here before trying the abandoned houses. The various apartments that used to house Collins carriage drivers and chauffeurs, grooms, blacksmiths and groundskeepers were all kept in good repair and certainly provided lots of cozy hiding places. They were supposedly all securely locked, but ten-year-old Burke, some ivy and a broken window had proved that "securely locked" is sometimes not so secure after all.
As he unlocked the arched door of the apartment around the corner from the barn—a dwelling known for some obscure reason as "the cottage"—Burke shivered, thinking of the last time he had stepped through this door.
He switched on the table-lamp at the center of the room and looked around. One of the knots of tension in his gut relaxed slightly as he confirmed that there was no trace of Laura in this room. There was nothing personal around the place to summon up memories of her, or of Matthew Morgan, or of anybody else who had lived here. It was just one of the generic interiors typical of the outlying dwellings on the Collins estate—stuffed with furniture old enough to be antiques but probably not rare enough to be interesting, and decorated with portraits of family members nobody really cared about anymore, but who weren't out-of-favor enough to be banished to the basement or the attics.
He went into the bedroom, and found it—again to his relief—just as bland and impersonal as the combination parlor, dining room and kitchen. He didn't really think that Daphne would be hiding behind the bathroom door or inside the bathtub, but he checked to be sure, and found the bathroom as untenanted as he'd expected.
"The cottage" was uninhabited, all right, but that didn't stop him from imagining that he saw Laura sitting by the fireplace, gazing with rapt fascination into a gleaming fire.
He locked the door again and hurried on past the many bays of the carriage house, and the many Collins family cars inside them. In its usual place in the fourth bay along he saw Roger's Mustang, gleaming and pristine, a first-class repair job having left no trace of its close encounter with rocks and a tree in that nasty incident with the bleeder valve.
Okay, Burke thought, I was kidding myself if I thought things only really got weird around here after I left. Maybe the stuff that happened back then wasn't quite as flashy as time-travel and alien slime monsters. But a vampire, a kid who tried to murder his own dad by removing the bleeder valve from his car, and an immortal femme fatale who burns her kids to death every hundred years or so were all plenty weird enough.
Beyond the carriage house was another set of living quarters—often referred to as the "carriage house" itself, with about as much logic as referring to the apartment where Laura had lived as a cottage. When he let himself inside here, Burke felt his tension level immediately ratchet up at the smell of old smoke lingering on the air. His memories sprang back to Laura, and to the horror of her trapping David inside the fishing shack with her, while flames leapt up all around them.
Take a deep breath, Burke, he told himself. You've got too many ghosties, ghoulies and things that go bump in the night running around in your head. At this rate, if Daphne does turn out to be in here, you'll be too damned out-of-it to catch her!
The front room of the "carriage house" apartment had the same generic Collins look as "the cottage." The back room was the source of the stale odor of smoke. There wasn't a scrap of furniture in it, and the floor, walls and ceiling were all scorched black. Burke scowled as he shone his flashlight around, wondering how in the heck a fire could have burned the inside of the room but not have spread to the rest of the building.
He remembered being told that the fire had happened while the unfortunate young man who had briefly been Carolyn's husband was living here. The unfortunate young man who might or might not have been somehow involved with the alien slime-monster murder cult.
Okay, he told himself, you've established that Daphne isn't in here, and you've also established that you're so damn preoccupied thinking about how spooky things are, that Daphne could probably be tiptoeing away right in front of you and you wouldn't even notice her.
Locking the apartment door after him, he headed across the courtyard to the old stables. He didn't think it was likely that Daphne would be hiding in the stables or the barn, but he needed to check them anyway. For that matter, she could be hiding in one of the Collins family cars. Weirder things had most definitely happened around here. He figured he would finish checking all the possible hiding spots on ground level, and then he would look through the upstairs apartments.
As he shone his flashlight's beam around the cavernous spaces of the long unoccupied stables, he felt again the reassuring solidity of the crucifix in his jacket pocket.
Burke thought, I wonder if Barnabas is home. When I get through searching here, I'll head over to the Old House and see if I can talk with him.
We've got to make a plan for getting rid of this vampire. Now that Vicki is—hopefully—out of danger, we need track this vampire to his lair and stop him. We can't afford to just keep blundering around in the woods whenever we hear a dog howling. We've got to find where the vampire's hiding and get rid of him, so Vicki will be able to come back home.
Unless, sounded an insidious, jealous whisper in his mind, unless she's already in her new home. Home, sweet home, in Bangor with Frank Garner.
Well, if that's the case, so what? We still need to kill this god-damned vampire. We need to kill him so he doesn't hurt anyone else the way that he's hurt Vicki.
It would make perfect sense, Burke knew, for Vicki to stay in Bangor.
She and Frank loved each other. They had been through a lot together. He was a fine young man, with good prospects. They made a lovely couple. They were perfect for each other.
Except for the fact that Vicki and I love each other, too. And we've been through a lot together. And I am a fine not-quite-so-young man, and I've got more than good prospects. We make a lovely couple, too. We are perfect for each other.
One of the many classic novels that Burke had read while he was in prison—catching up on the book-learning he hadn't managed to get as a kid—was Dracula. Memories from out of that book had come back to him a lot in 1967, during Collinsport's first wave of vampire attacks. That had happened to him a lot recently, too. And he was remembering something from the novel now, but it wasn't any of the sequences involving vampires.
He remembered something that was said by one of the heroines of the book, the one who had three guys proposing marriage to her in one day. He remembered her saying something like, "Why can't a girl marry three men, or as many of them as want her?"
Of course, he told himself, Vicki, Carolyn and any other self-respecting young woman these days would say that the question needed some adjusting. They would point out that it shouldn't be "as many men as want her." It ought to be "as many men as she wants."
That was the worst thing of all about this stupid love triangle in which he, Vicki and Frank had gotten stuck.
Victoria Winters genuinely loved both of them. Both of them genuinely loved her. She had promised to marry each of them, and Burke didn't believe that either time she had made a mistake. Both Frank and Burke could make her happy.
So which one would she choose? How could she possibly decide which to choose?
Would she marry the fiancé she had lost three years ago, when an airline disaster left her no choice but to believe him dead?
Or would she marry the fiancé she'd been about to wed half a year ago, when the phone call came from Brazil and revealed that her first fiancé was alive?
Burke almost wished that Vicki could marry both of them. Except he couldn't bear the concept of having to share her with anyone. And he knew that Frank Garner, mild-mannered fellow though he was, wouldn't be able to bear that, either.
God damn it, he thought, as he left the stables and retraced his steps alongside the many bays of the carriage house, I'm afraid Vicki isn't going to choose either of us. I'm afraid she'll decide to turn both of us down, so she doesn't have to face the pain of rejecting only one of us.
He had told Vicki many things about his experiences in the jungle; about the amnesia and about his slow journey back from it. But he hadn't told her the one most important thing. He didn't intend to tell her—not until after she married him, if she ever did.
He hadn't told her that her face was the only thing he remembered, when he fought his way out from the fever brought on by his injuries, and he realized that he did not know his own name.
He did not know who he was, where he had come from, how he'd got there, what had happened to him. But he did know that, somewhere, a beautiful young woman was waiting for him. He knew she was waiting for him, and she loved him. And he knew her face.
There had been so many nights before he remembered anything else, when he fell asleep with the vision of Vicki's face before his eyes. So many nights and so many days when he imagined finally finding her again, imagined kissing the face that he had dreamed of for so long, imagined running his hands through her beautiful night-dark hair.
And even before he remembered that his name was Burke Devlin, he remembered her name. He had remembered "Vicki" before anything else.
But there's no way in hell, he thought, that I am going to tell her that. I can't tell her. I can't put that kind of guilt on her. I can't tell her, "Vicki, you can't choose Frank, even if he's the one you'd rather spend the rest of your life with. You can't choose him, because you were all I remembered when I'd lost everything else."
With a blank feeling of surprise, Burke suddenly noticed that a woman was sitting on the hood of Roger Collins' Mustang.
Or he supposed it was a woman, judging by the pose in which the figure was sitting—the sort of casually elegant pose used by models in car ads. But the figure was wearing a long, hooded cape, making it impossible for him to tell exactly who or what that figure actually was.
Daphne? He wondered. But there was a cold, sickly feeling of dread in his gut. He knew his dread was caused by the fact that Laura had sometimes worn a long, hooded cape.
He drew close to that bay of the carriage house, and the figure slowly slid down off the hood and started walking toward him. He wondered why he had the impression that the figure was moving in slow motion.
"Good evening, Mr. Devlin," said a soft, husky feminine voice. "I've been looking forward to meeting you."
The voice wasn't Laura's. That was something to be thankful for. But even though this woman wasn't Laura, he knew that something strange was happening to him.
He ought to be able to see her face better than he could, hood or no hood. The light in the carriage-house bay was behind her, but there were lights outside in the courtyard that ought to cast some illumination on her face. But they did not.
In the shadows of her hood, somehow all he could see was her eyes. He wasn't certain what color they were; green, perhaps. And they were glowing. He could see them, great orbs of light in the darkness. He had the sensation that her eyes were literally drinking him in; absorbing his will and his energy as she gazed at him.
He should be able to just reach into his pocket, pull out his flashlight and shine it into her face. But he wasn't doing that, and he knew that he wouldn't do it. He knew that he wouldn't do anything unless she told him to.
What the hell is happening to me?
The woman was right in front of him now, almost touching him. Almost, but not quite.
"You stopped her from coming to me," the woman stated. Her voice was still soft, but he could hear a cutting coldness in it, like a knife blade carved from ice. "You stopped her from coming to me, and you helped others take her away. So, now, I am going to take you from her."
Slowly, she reached up one hand to his face. She stroked down along his cheekbone, stinging him slightly with the pressure from one fingernail. She stroked down the line of his jaw and then she began playing with the skin of his throat, tickling and teasing with whisper-soft finger touches and an occasional bite from her nails.
Oh, my God, Burke Devlin thought.
Oh, my God, I know what she is.
The realization came to him with blinding clarity—clarity that was, of course, utterly too late.
God damn, he thought, we've all of us been a bunch of male chauvinist pigs! All of us, Dr. Julia Hoffman included.
All the time we've spent talking about the vampire, speculating on who it is, trying to figure out how to save Vicki—all this time, it never occurred to any of us that the vampire might be a woman.
His hand closed around the crucifix in his pocket. But he knew, with inescapable certainty, that he would never be able to bring it out and hold up that crucifix in front of her.
And the vampire knew what he was doing and thinking.
"You aren't going to need that, Burke," she murmured, with purring amusement in her voice. "You aren't going to need anything but me."
Her forefinger seemed to be dancing across his throat. With every few passes of her hand he felt her fingernail slice more deeply, until he felt certain that his blood was oozing from multiple tiny cuts.
"You don't need to be afraid," the vampire went on. "I am going to punish you for taking her from me, but the punishment won't hurt you. Quite the contrary. You're going to want it. And want more of it. It's going to become all you ever want. And," she continued, "I'm not going to kill you. Not for a long, long time. You're going to be much more useful to me alive."
Right now, the foremost thought in Burke's mind was that he was tired of all this talk.
"So do it," he grated at the vampire. "Stop talking and do it now."
She chuckled, and she sounded pleased. "So impatient," she observed. "I like that. Very well, dear, dear Burke. I won't make you wait any longer."
She brought her hand around and pushed against the back of his neck, urging him to lean down toward her. He obeyed, with no thought that he could do anything else. She kept hold of the nape of his neck—stroking, rubbing, fingernails occasionally digging in. With her other hand she reached up to stoke his hair and his face. And she brought her mouth to his throat.
The touch of her lips on his skin—and the touch of her fangs—made him think of Laura.
He felt certain that the creature whose fangs were in his neck would not appreciate him thinking of someone else. But there was nothing he could do to stop it, any more than he could stop her.
He felt with her the same way he had felt with Laura—the same knowledge that he was helpless, that his will was hers, that every action he performed would be at her command. And he felt the same pleasure in that knowledge, the same joy of surrendering himself—of giving up his own troubles and concerns, for the satisfaction of serving her.
As the vampire drank from Burke's throat, another thought made its way through his mind.
He thought, It's a good thing this happened to me. Now Vicki and Frank can be happy together, like they deserve to be.
Now Vicki won't ever have to choose between Frank Garner and me.
