William Hollingshead Loomis brooded as he turned for the main street from Collins Enterprises and drove to the high school. His son was undoubtedly up to trouble once more he realized. The boy was clearly not busy enough and had a lot of Carolyn in him. The two of them were at their wit's end to keep his delinquency out of the public eye.
The hesitant father eyed the exercise studio briefly as he turned past it. Built on the ashes of the old Todd Antique Store, the place was quickly becoming the center of activity since Maggie and Carolyn had opened it. Both of them were trying hard to match Angelique in physical perfection. Willie didn't have the nerve to tell them it was a fruitless cause against a white witch with two hundred years of mystical spells behind her.
Turning on to the school grounds, Willie didn't bother to park. His mustache puffed up with his top lip as he stopped his out front at the curb, switched off his car and headed inside the school. He headed straight to the office in a routine he had done several times.
"I'm here to see Principal Karlen." He replied as he entered.
"Willie," Karlen came from round the corner where the coffee machine was and shook his hand. The two of them were almost allies in J.R's rehabilitation.
"Get Loomis out of class." Principal Karlen turned and replied to the receptionist as he led the way to his office. Sipping his coffee, he lead the way to his office once more and closed the door as Willie found his usual seat.
"What's he done this time?" Willie asked.
"Check those out." Karlen picked up some snapshots and handed them over. As Willie thumbed through them, he saw pictures of his daughter and the daughters of Quentin and Barnabas in various styles of dress and undress in photos of varying clarity. Lizzie was in a skimpy bra in one and Sara was in a wet bikini adjusting her bottom in another. In another, Amanda was pulling her sweater on over herself with her back to the camera. There were numerous duplicates as well as several computer-enhanced. Lizzie had horns in one and Sara had larger computer-generated breasts in another. Willie groaned in distaste at these demented pictures and pulled his hair back upset in frustrated anxiety.
"I took those off your son." Karlen answered. "He was selling them in gym class at ten dollars a piece and up to his class mates. I'm not sure how many more are still floating around the school."
"That boy..." Willie scowled disgustedly at a picture of his daughter pulling on her bra. "I'm going to kill him. I'm going to ship him to military school..."
"I don't know how to handle this except to throw him out of school for a week." Karlen looked across quite a bit unnerved and exasperated. "And of course, I think he should be disciplined at home."
"Well, I..." Willie started as the door sounded. J.R. strided in nervously and silently as he found his usual seat and sat down grinning at this get together before disrespectfully propping his feet up on a shelf. Father and principal stared the opportunistic adolescent down as they both fumed.
"Is there a problem?" he asked.
"Problem?" Willie stood trying not to be the hitting father he had growing up. Exerting a lot of self-control, he exhaled as if he was containing a volcano about to erupt. "You prostitute your sister and cousins and don't think it's a problem?"
"I didn't prostitute them." J.R. looked back. "I just sold their pictures."
"J.R." Karlen leaned back. "I've discussed it with your father and you're thrown out of school for a week. It will be up to you to make up everything on your return."
"And I'm not going to be that lenient at home." Willie answered. "And your mother is going to be going into conniptions over these pictures." He stood and led the way as he opened the office door to the delinquent he and Carolyn had unleashed on the world. J.R. tried to contain his glee as he first marched to his fifth period class and then his locker for his books and then outside to be taken to Collinwood. Exiled to home was not much of a punishment to him since it meant he could sleep in while his sister and cousins woke at dawn for his Aunt Maggie to drive them to school. Catching up on his work wasn't a hassle either since he could Xerox the work from his friends. The only hard part was the silence and upset disgrace from his parents. His father hadn't said a word to him since they left the school, but J.R. felt a lot of anger from him.
"My dad..." Willie stammered as he started the car and pulled off. "Used to beat me so black and blue I ran off to join the merchant marines. I am not going to be the kind of man he was, but you are really make it hard."
"I'm sorry." The boy rolled his eyes to his mother's studio as they squealed past. Her car wasn't out front so she was most likely back at Collinwood. He tried turning his attention away from the predicament he was in. "Are you ever anything else but sorry?"
"You know, if I had a better allowance I wouldn't do things like this for extra cash." J.R. replied thinking he had the answer.
"I wouldn't play that card, buster." Willie turned on to Collins Road trying to guess what Carolyn was going to do when he revealed the pictures to her. "Do you want me to start hitting you?"
"No."
"My..." Willie stammered out his swear words as he turned the car to Collins Road. It was going to be a very long night. "How did I get such a conniving…" He flashed back on his youth. "My god, I have become my own father!"
2
The two Collins daughters made there way through the path in the woods to Collinwood from their high school. They were both exceptionally attractive even if the redhead was unsure of how much she was really objectified by boys. Bearing the blue eyes of Quentin Collins and the quiet composure of Maggie Evans-Collins, Amanda Collins held her books insecurely in front of her as her cousin spoke to her of relationships and boys and anything else that popped into her pretty blonde head. Lizzie Loomis looked as if she was the daughter of Madonna and the granddaughter of Marilyn Monroe. Possessing the effervescent personality of Carolyn Stoddard-Loomis and the temperance of Willie Loomis, the blonde spitfire was the opposite of her quiet and unassuming cousin Amanda. The two of them had strided across the front veranda of the estate as they already heard the shrieks and yelling of her mother emanating with furious intent out of the echoes of the drawing room. She heard her brother's name and grinned it was him and not her. It felt so assuringly good to see him in trouble again. Amanda just rolled her eyes at the disturbance as the two of them started up the stairs. Preferring to hide in the shadows, she followed Lizzie insecurely and unassumingly without a word.
"How could you do this to your sister!" Carolyn screamed as Lizzie stopped and looked back to the drawing room doors. "This is the lowest thing you've ever done! Just what goes through your..."
"What'd he do!" Lizzie threw open the doors of the drawing room. Carolyn was standing above J.R. sitting on the sofa as Willie stood by waiting for an opening.
"Lizzie," Carolyn looked up. "Keep out of this. This does not concern you."
"What did he do!" Lizzie asked as Amanda stood hiding in the background quietly listening from the stairs.
"Lizzie." Willie carefully escorted his buxom daughter out. "Stay out of this." He closed the doors and locked them as his wife groaned again. With that distraction, Willie's more calmed voice was a bit incoherent to eavesdrop on through the door. Lizzie's eyes turned to her cousin William coming toward her from the study. Her father's ever present namesake, Barnabus's son was in line to inherit Collinwood after Carolyn or David.
"What did he do?" Lizzie stopped him.
"Well," William uneasily groaned and stalled a bit realizing he knew the ugly answers J.R. was being reprimanded over. "You know that spy
camera he ordered a few weeks ago?"
"Yes..." Lizzie stretched the word out growing morbidly curious by the second.
"He took several covert pictures of you, Amanda and Sara around the house and sold them to the guys at school." William admitted while Amanda became appalled and upset. Any other girl might have wanted revenge, but Amanda retreated into her shell and ran up to her room in the West Wing to hide from the world and her own appearance. Lizzie dropped her jaw as she absorbed the realization and looked silently to the drawing room doors as her mother started screaming again to something J.R. had said.
"Whose picture did he sell the most of?" Lizzie asked curiously as it was William's turn to roll his eyes and head home. The son of Barnabas Collins flipped up the collars on his leather jacket and pulled on his Collinsport High School cap as he walked the path to the Old House. Down the veranda and toward the garage behind the estate, the leisure twenty-minute walk often varied. If he ran it, it was about ten to twelve minutes, but a leisure stroll was almost stretched to thirty. It always took him past the pool house built over the foundation of the old greenhouse and past the field where forgotten Collins members once grew and harvested corn among other things. William often thought of his descendants on the walk to his father's house and fantasized about traveling in time and what he'd meet. While all the younger Collins had their own pursuits, his personal pursuit was exploring books to research the past and what anything else he wanted to know. Born in 1971, he was the first of the next generation kids born on the estate since his Uncle David.
"Dad!" He entered the foyer of the ancestral manor on the estate known as the Old House and hung his cap and jacket over a familiar
wolf-handled cane on the coat rack.
"Yes." Barnabas looked up from his book. Placing his bookmark in place, the graying Collins looked up proudly to his son and saw a bit of his dearly departed brother Jeremiah in him.
"Could you help me with something?" The eighteen year old asked as his mother stepped out to greet him. Time had stopped on Angelique's appearance as her children and husband grew up around her.
"I would love to do nothing more to help you." Barnabas beamed proudly over his son.
"I need some help on the family tree." The young man continued as Barnabas passed a glance to his wife. "My history teacher has all of us tracing our family trees and I can't find anything on the English branch up at Collinwood. I could trace Carolyn back to Isaac and the family in England, but what about our relatives back to the first Barnabas Collins in the portrait?"
"Oh, uh..." Barnabas rambled a bit nervously.
"Well, you see darling..." Angelique took her son by the shoulders and revealed her frightened look to Barnabas. "Your ancestors... uh."
"I've got Uncle Adam on the list." William juggled his books and notes. "Which of dad's brothers was his father? What about the sister dad said died very early? What was her name? And what about the William Collins in the mausoleum? Where does he fit in?"
"Well," Angelique needed time to think. "Why don't you go up and get your things ready? We'll be up there in a minute."
"Okay," The young man was unaware of the turmoil he had started. "Mom, I bet I could trace your relatives back to the ancestor you said was persecuted as a witch."
"I'd like that." Angelique smiled appreciatively as she carefully watched William vanish up the staircase then turned in a fret. "Great! What are we going to tell him? Why can't that school just teach him reading, writing and arithmetic!"
"Well, let's see..." Barnabas paused thinking things out. "Julia and I passed ourselves off as my children in 1840. We can start there."
"And you were your own ancestor again in 1897." Angelique recalled the events. "That could be that Barnabus's grandson."
"And then you could be that Barnabus's daughter when you visited Collinwood in the 1930s." Barnabas tried to think.
"By Kitty Hampshire." Angelique realized that no one found Kitty after she replaced Josette in 1795. "That Angelique would have to have a brother. We just fill in the gaps and get some old photos and... do you think we can fool him?"
"Do you want to tell him I was born in 1770 and you were born in 1675?"
Barnabas looked up to Angelique rather earnestly.
"We can fool him." Angelique remised a bit.
3
J.R. Loomis dealt with his punishment like the teenager he was. Not only out of school for the week, but also he was grounded for the month except for when he'd be taken to his Uncle David's restraunt to wash dishes and bus tables. That would certainly warn him against another manipulating financial opportunity. Maggie was also going to return briefly to being his governess to tutor him and possibly bring up his
grade point average. He collected his schoolbooks as his sister appeared in the doorway of his bedroom.
"Awwwww..." Lizzie grinned. "Did we get into a peck of trouble? It is so good to see you in trouble."
"Shut up before I push you over the balcony." J.R. mumbled as he started for the stairs.
"I think that's worth another month there." Lizzie grinned again to be the favorite child now. J.R. just ignored her as he scrambled down the stairs to the drawing room. Willie looked up expecting him as Carolyn handled the household finances at the desk.
"Let's see what you got here." Willie calmly took an interest in his son's education as he eyed the boy's books. "I was never good in math, you'll need Maggie to help you there. I was never good in science either. Spelling, English,... what's your history teacher got you doing?"
"We need to build a family tree." J.R. answered bored already.
"Wait a minute," Carolyn swung around from her mother's old desk. "You and William are a grade apart. How many teachers are asking for family trees?"
"Mrs. Barrett teaches all grades." J.R. looked at his mother as he sat next to his father. "She's got all of us doing it. Do we have a Loomis family history?"
"Uhhhhhhhhh, sort of," Willie scratched his head. "Before me and your mother got married, I traced my family as back as I could." Carolyn took a deep breath as Willie started the talk they had discussed years ago.
"My father," Willie began. "Was Archibald Loomis and he worked the old steamer lines in Brooklyn and the old pneumatic tunnel underground before it was closed down. That's pretty historical. I have two brothers somewhere and a sister I lost track of. Grandpa was Benjamin Loomis who died when I was very little. His father came over from Holland in the 1850s or so."
"Willie," Carolyn said his name as if he was leaving out an important fact. "Benjamin's grandfather on his mother's side was Desmond Collins from New York." Willie became plaintively honest as J.R. looked up in surprise.
"Collins?" J.R. didn't know if he was appalled or ecstatic. Trying to figure out his thoughts, he looked back to his mother as though she already knew. "You mean I'm a Collins on both sides? But... where's the money? Where's the inheritance? You mean you and mom are cousins? No wonder Lizzie and I are so screwed up!"
"J.R." Carolyn pulled her hair out of her face. "The New York branch was descended from Amadeus Collins, a brother of Isaac Collins and uncle of Joshua Collins. This isn't Arkansas; your father and I have a lot of distant ancestors between us, and it didn't become obvious until after you were born and your father wanted to trace his family line to have something to be proud of on the Loomis side of the family. As far as the money, Desmond's sons lost much of it in the Civil War and were completely wiped out by the Great Depression."
"You see," Willie continued. "Desmond was a great lawyer and he tried to enter politics several times, but he was also conservative and didn't get to go very far."
"He also financed his cousin, the first Quentin Collins, in several experiments trying to contact the spirits of the dead among several other impractical inventions." Carolyn added. "The two of them squandered a lot of money as Geoffrey Collins broke contact with them."
"And Geoffrey was..."
"The father of my grandfather, Edward Collins." Carolyn admitted.
"But you still married mom!" J.R. was still borderline hysterical as he grew used to the skeletons in the closet.
"Naomi Collins was from the New York Collins!" Carolyn revealed. "Her brother Abner married Flora and they had Desmond Collins. It was a different world then. No one knew a think about genetics back then. They wanted to keep the money in the family."
"But we lost the money!" J.R. was fixated on the realization.
"Look, buster," Willie messed up his boy's head. "Do you want help with this or not? You've got a much more interesting family tree than William or Jamison."
"Okay," J.R. started jotting down things as Lizzie passed by the outside of the drawing room. "Hey, Lizzie! Mom and dad are cousins!"
"What are you, nuts or something?" She shot back as J.R. rushed out to spill the disturbing secret. Willie and Carolyn looked toward each other.
"They had to hear it sooner or later." Willie mumbled.
"I wonder how Barnabas and Angelique are handling William." Carolyn turned back to the desk.
4
Sara Collins strided through the front doors of the Old House. Hanging her jacket by the door, she scanned the parlor and noticed it empty. Her father who was often found in his chair reading was nowhere in sight and her mother didn't rush to greet her. A bit temperamental for the moment, her mind turned briefly to Joe Haskell Jr. They had reconciled this morning and were now broken up again as she looked for her mother to talk to about it.
"Mom!" She screamed.
"Down here!" Angelique screamed from the cellar doors. Mother and son were kneeling by a trunk in the attic as Angelique showed the old clothing of forgotten relatives to her son. Sara came down the stairs as they knelt near the odd coffin-shaped spot on the floor near trunks of old clothing and forgotten possessions.
"Your ancestor's brother, Jeremiah, wore this." Angelique revealed.
"Wow." William held up the old musty jacket as he checked the pockets. "A 1985-quarter?" He looked up suspiciously.
"A guest wore it when your father and I got married." Angelique admitted. "Almost everyone wore period clothes."
"But that was 1971." William added. A 1985-quarter in 1971?"
"Maybe the ghosts wore it." Angelique irritatingly stopped making up excuses to cover up old travels through time.
"Mom," Sara whined. "Joe was a jerk again. Talk to me..."
"I will, darling." Angelique beamed and kissed her daughter and saw herself at fifteen. "But I'm helping your brother in a school project."
Sara scuffed her foot on the coffin-shaped spot in the stone floor. Her father had always claimed it was water damage, but William said it was left over from a vampire two hundred years ago. He was always scaring her back then before they all stopped going to Maggie for lessons and started going to high school. Sara looked up briefly and watched the feet of her mother vanish up the stairs with her brother as her eyes drifted back over the wooden beams.
Alone for the moment, her eyes stopped a second. There was an old book jammed in the rafters. She locked her gaze on it and pushed the chest over under it. Stepping up on the old chest, she hoped she didn't crash through the lid as she pulled loose the book. Moving over to the light from upstairs, she sat on the bottom of the stone staircase and pulled open the peeling leather cover. It was some sort of journal with all sorts of handwritten entries. She had to lift the book to her eyes to read the faded scribbling, but the writing almost matched her mother's handwriting on the grocery list. She could barely read the lost words.
"A journal..." Her eyes strained on the words. "...Of spells and curses...by...Angelica? Angelique… Miranda… DuVal…" Sara dropped her jaw. "Mom was right! Her ancestor was a witch!"
5
Her ancestor's diary and journal was a hard read with many of its pages as thin as parchment and the ink in it as faded as the memory of the person who must have wrote it. According to what Sara read, a white witch named Hester Bouchard from whom she took her name had taught her ancestor. A darker more sinister man ten years her senior named Judah Zachary then romanced her. Judah indicted her into her coven as they experimented into darker sources such as Satanism and animal sacrifice. Miranda even allowed herself to be romanced by someone named Charles Nicholas Dawson from Blair, Maryland.
"The Blair Witch!" Sara mumbled to herself excited to realize her family line was connected to that infamous Maryland ghost story and then further read the scribbling in the light from her lamp. She excitedly read on in the secret of her room as her ancestor described in vivid detail the atrocities and invocations of Zachary before his trial. Forced to testify against her master, this first Angelique had to escape to Martinique to flee her surviving cult members. Instead of reading about the mistress Angelique hated or the man she declared to be her true love, Sara thumbed through the book and discovered lengthy volumes for curses and spells. Joe Haskell Junior immediately came to her mind as she read the list of tools she needed and the words she needed to do them. An old Ken doll would be her voodoo doll and a strip off Joe's letter jacket would be her link to him. Sara started a fire in the fireplace of her bedroom and looked up to Josette's portrait. She seemed to be scowling displeased down at her.
"He's a guy! He deserves it." Sara announced to the portrait as she took her impromptu voodoo doll and huddled before her burning fire.
"I call upon the spirits of sky and earth, the fires of hell and the souls lost in limbo. I declare this effigy to be that of Joseph Edward Haskell II and that his will bend to my will..."
"Sara." Angelique knocked at the door. "I'm sorry I was so distracted. Did you want to talk about something?"
"Just a minute!" Sara's eyes widened as she slid the doll and the book to under her bed as is and stood up. She pulled her long blonde hair back and composed herself a second.
"Why is this door locked?" Angelique rattled the doorknob. As she did, Sara unlocked it, grinned the smile that made boys fall in love with her and stuck her head out to her mother.
"Yes?" She appeared so All-American innocent that her mother couldn't help but be suspicious.
"What are you doing in there?" Mother folded her arms.
"Nothing!" Sara claimed.
"Did you want to talk to me?"
"No," Sara was eager to be left alone. Angelique narrowed her eyes suspiciously and looked behind her daughter. She didn't smell cigarette smoke or any of those horrible substances that teens were so stereotypically experimenting with in the movies. She just nodded her head and stepped back.
"I'll be downstairs." Angelique answered.
"All right." Sara closed her door and locked it once more. Angelique turned back down the hall past her son's room and headed down the back stairs to the kitchen where Julia was sitting at the table and reading the newspaper. In her twilight, her health was not what it used to be, after two cancer scares and a triple by-pass, she was not sure how long she was going to be around. Barnabas had welcomed her to retire in his home and Angelique had buried all her old grudges to help take care of her. Julia meanwhile looked around the Old House over people and places she cherished and prepared herself to someday pass away happily. At least she knew she would go with friend. Across from her, the legs of Willie Loomis stuck out from under the sink as he once more replaced the pipes he had installed for Barnabas so long ago. Julia's head wearily turned up and grinned toward the preoccupied mother moving above her.
"Problems in parental paradise?" She giggled.
"I don't know." Angelique stepped over Willie as she poured a cup of tea. "I've come to know when William was up to something, but Sara? I can't read her like my son."
"That's because she's just like you." Julia grinned. "She thinks as well as looks just like you."
"Angelique," Willie groaned as he sat up. "You got to tell Barnabas this garbage disposal does not chew up everything. It just won't take chicken bones and coffee filters."
"Willie," Angelique crouched in her white Capri pants. "You know Barnabas just as well as I do. He still lives as if he's still in the..." Sara started screaming upstairs. Beside her screams, there was the sound of winds whooshing from inside the Old House as Julia sprinted up the stairs first. Sara was hysterical as Julia as she grabbed the door and pulled to open it.
"Sara! Open the door!" Julia pounded on it. Angelique pounded on it beside her.
"Mom!" Sara was screaming and pleading for help in some storm inside the room.
"Let me." Willie sized up the door as he respectfully moved Angelique aside. Sara was yelling her head off as he backed up and hit his shoulder to the door. It didn't give as he stepped back more this time and with a running start charged it. The door flew open as he was lurched off his feet in the wind and pulled through the currents of air being pulled into the mirror on the closet. Sara was clutching the post of her canopy bed with all her might as she too was being pulled through the vacuum in the room. The bed as heavy as it was had started sliding as Sara cried. Angelique recognized the book stuck to the floor in front of the fireplace and rushed downstairs.
"Angelique!" Julia watched Angelique vanish from her sight and race back downstairs. The worried doctor grabbed a hold of the doorframe while doors through the house were slamming shut from the pressure building up in the house. She reached out to Sara as she stretched her arm to her. The girl was stuck in the air as her shoes came off and were pulled into the mirror. Sara was going to be sucked into the dimensional hole in the mirror if Julia didn't get her.
Downstairs, Angelique grabbed the big mirror from the hall outside Joshua's former study and heaved it up the stairs. From somewhere the petrified mother found her adrenaline and rushed into Sara's room with the heavy ten-pound mirror. Julia was nowhere in sight and Sara was being pulled loose as her mother raced forward and sealed the missing mirror with another reflective surface and cover the opening of the vortex being created. Everything crashed to the floor as the doorway was corked. Sara crashed to her stomach as her mother whispered a few spells under her breath.
"Mom?"
"Where did you get that book!" Angelique grabbed her old journal. Distressed, upset and scared to every core of her being, Sara was more concerned about her hair as she looked up from the floor. Trying to dismiss what she had seen, she fretfully looked up scared to death to her mother with the demeanor of a tortured waif.
"I don't want you playing with that book!" Angelique yelled again. "You never open a spell without a psychic link or a stable threshold." She quickly realized she had said too much and looked around a bit. "Where are Willie and Julia?"
Sara stared to her mirror now restored by the innate anathema from the other mirror from downstairs.
"Oh my..." Angelique gasped a bit.
6
Julia stirred a bit as she looked around. This wasn't her room in the Old House or her old room in Collinwood. She was in a small cabin with a burning fireplace and surrounded by hunting rifles and all sorts of antique hand carved furniture. The last thing she remembered was trying to help Sara after the girl had opened a mystical vortex in her room. She was hanging on to the door jam and then felt propelled through space as if she were flying through the air. She was then unconscious and dreaming she was being carried. A figure stirred near the fire and came up to her.
"You poor dear, your brother said you lost your horse." She placed a wet rag to her head. She was brunette and attractive with trusting big blue-green eyes. Julia recognized her immediately.
"Victoria!" She sat up. "Victoria Winters!"
"Who?" The girl looked at her. "No, I'm afraid you are mistaken. I am Chloe Harridge, wife of Joshua and mother to his son, Aaron. I know not of this Victoria you speak of."
"Where am I?" Julia discovered she was in period clothes again! She had been sent back in time again! "What's the date?"
"It is October 11 in the year of our Lord 1679." Chloe moved to the fireplace mantle of the cabin. "You are in the tiny settlement of
Collinsport. Dirty and disgusting as it is with mud everywhere and all sorts of vermin about." She picked up a cracked plate and spooned some mutton broth on to it. The broth was thin and the mutton not thoroughly cooked, but Julia grinned and appreciated the labors and kindness of her hostess.
"Thank you for the kindness of your lodgings." Willie made do with his experience as he and Joshua Harridge returned to the cabin. If Barnabas and Julia could do it, he had to muster through and bear with it as well.
"Did you meet Isaac?" Joshua grinned to his wife than show emotions before strangers. "Did he too mistake you for his brother, Amadeus?"
"He did." Willie glanced to Julia. "He thought I was the son of his long lost Cousin Barnabas lost in the Atlantic."
"Willie, brother." Julia grinned as she heard of yet another earlier Barnabas she never knew existed. She placed aside her plate and stood up a bit wobbly. "Are we..."
"Perhaps you are still stricken with fever?" Chloe asked.
"No." Julia didn't dare say she was a doctor in this day and age. Joshua and Chloe might think she were mad in this day of female subservience. "I just need to speak to my brother." She excused herself as she stepped out of the cabin and eyed the surroundings she could not believe. She recognized the foundation of the courthouse being built. It was the same structure where Victoria would be convicted of witchcraft and which would house the Historical Museum in 1985. Her jaw dropped at the muddy streets over laden with wagon tracks and the surrounds woods constantly being chopped down as she turned to Willie. It was inconceivable that so many would be left to cover the estate in their time.
"Willie, is it true?" She asked. "Did we travel in time again?"
"You tell me." Willie pointed up the far hill where a white square was being erected in the far distance at least a mile hence. Her eyes rounded a bit more as she recognized the pillars out front and the start of the cupola on the roof. It was the Old House being built! Workers swarmed over it like ants as Isaac Collins built it for his coming wife.
"I can't believe it." Julia watched Willie fretfully spin round and sit on a barrel. "No I-Ching, No Staircase through time? How will we get back?"
"I was hoping you'd tell me." Willie felt as lost as he'd ever been. There were no asking directions in this situation as he looked to Julia for the answers. "As well as I can figure out. We are presently standing somewhere between the Haskell Farm and Eagle Hill Cemetery." He pointed beyond an alley to the first three tombstones of workers killed on the original Collins docks.
"There has to be a way!" Julia pulled at her costume.
"We could ask Angelique?" Willie mumbled.
"Angelique? Here?" Julia scoffed as Willie pointed at a wild, dirty haired blonde eight-year-old girl running from fear of a store merchant in a tent. She ran off stealing a loaf of bread under her arm as she dashed under a wagon like a loose rat to lose the angry adult chasing her. Julia laughed at the sight of the pixie-faced little thief as she got an idea.
"Willie," She began thinking as her face turned contemplative. "When was Rose Cottage built?"
"I don't know." Willie thought as he took the dried beef from his pocket and chewed it. "Barnabas thought it was built the same time as the Old House."
"That's what I thought." Julia lifted her hand to her head to shield her eyes from the sun. "Quentin should still be razing it to modernize it in our time. If we stuck a message inside a wall we knew he was knocking down..."
"But what if..."
"Willie," Julia stopped his pessimism. "It's a chance. Try and get a job there. Let me know if you succeed."
"Sure, Julia." Willie glanced at her and ran toward Collinwood. Turning on her heel, Julia watched Barnabus's future wife coming toward her still carrying the stolen bread. She grinned toward the wild-eyed youth as little Angelique glared at her as the wild child she was.
"You are going to be a bigger problem as an adult." She told her as the future witch stuck her tongue out at her.
7
Quentin drove past the Old House for the Old MacGruder House on the back edge of the property. Closer to Frid Street than Collins Street, he was eager to move into the house and give Maggie her own home as he'd always intended and take the two of them out of the restored West Wing. The first Jeremiah Collins had purchased the house way back in 1790 just before Collinwood proper was built. Abner and Flora Collins called it home first and raised their son, Desmond, there. The house stood empty when they moved to the family property in New York left behind by Millicent Collins. Someone somewhere had once called it Rose Cottage; a name that it was just starting to be called again.
"Quentin." Chris Jennings looked up as Quentin skipped up the front veranda. Twenty men covered the house from Chris's contracting firm as they ripped down old walls and repainted new ones. Electricians wired the new lights and plumbers updated and modernized the old ones.
"That hot tub Maggie picked out is not going to fit." Chris leaned over the floor plans.
"Make it fit." Quentin appeared rascally with a glint of the ladies man still in his eye. "Her heart is to lay in a soapy bath with cucumber slices on her eyes and in her own words, 'leave the world behind.'"
"Well," Chris wished his brother Tom was still alive to help in their father's old business. "We can get rid of this closet and expand this one into this other bedroom. One big closet adjoining two rooms, how about that?"
"Stick in a pink princess phone and my daughter will be ecstatic!" Quentin chuckled a minute. "How about the chandelier? Were you able to rebuild the old one for the foyer?"
"It's going to take a bit longer." Chris paused to sign off some specifications. "Those fittings are out of date. Do you want to replace them or..."
"Hey, Chris..." Bruno Hess came down from razing the bathroom. Although only a part-time employee, Hess loved to hammer a nail when he wasn't on duty on Collinsport's small police force. "Look what I found. Think it's the missing deed?" He held up a dusty green wine bottle dirty from the ages. "It was inside the wall between two beams."
"Probably," Chris tried to pull the cork by hand. "When I worked at Summerwind, they buried it in the foundation."
"Let me see that." Quentin tried to peer through the dust in the bottle. "Could be a treasure map. My father said Blackbeard and Vasquez traveled these waters."
"Yeah, well..." Chris mugged a bit as Quentin too tried to pry off the cork.
"Here's how you open a bottle." Hess took the bottle and swung it hard into the fireplace. The glass shattered as he mugged a bit himself.
"Why didn't I think of that?" Quentin grinned as Chris chuckled at him. He turned to the glass fragments in the empty fireplace and moved carefully as he fished the thin parchment out of the glass particles reflecting the light from the lamps. He unrolled the paper as his grin slowly drifted away and his face turned to worry.
"Don't tell me." Chris watched him. "It's a deed saying Collinwood belongs to the Indians."
"Did I mention my ancestors were Penobscot?" Hess chuckled a bit while Quentin looked spooked. They stopped cheering him as Quentin ran his hands fearfully back through his hair.
"Quentin?"
"What?" The former scoundrel looked up. "Oh... It's a, uh, letter written to the first Barnabas Collins. Wait till Barnabas sees this." He rolled it back up. "Back in a little while." He stepped slowly past Chris through the space the doors to the parlor would go and ran out to his SUV. Chris glanced to Bruno briefly and shrugged it off as he continued working.
8
Willie Loomis smuggled the green wine bottle he had in his jacket as he returned to work on the mansion the MacGruders were building on the would-be Collins property. The bottle had been cleaned and scrubbed, Julia's note rolled up and slid in through the top and the cork sealed with wax. He braced himself as they lifted up the old sheet of horse hair plaster to the wall of the mansion's second floor bedroom and in another secret gesture moved the bottle with the message and stood it up on a stud inside the wall. Encased in the wall for the next three hundred years, he pictured it all ready there when Barnabas was cursed with his old affliction and through the 1840s when Julia and Barnabas altered the fate of Gerard Stiles. It would be distant from the happenings that caused Quentin to fear the moon until 1971 and from himself releasing Barnabas from a certain tomb. He wondered if somewhere in all these cross-time scenarios there was still other future Collinses lurking around to protect even more future families from other as yet unseen terrors.
"Loomis!"
"Yes. Mr. MacGruder?" Willie wiped his brow from the work he was doing.
"Mr. Collins, is here to see you."
"He is?" Willie gasped again as he turned toward the bustling circular staircase still being built. Isaac Collins looked enough like Barnabus to actually be him. The face, the profile and the demeanor was all there as if he was looking on the Barnabus Collins from before the curse.
"Mr. Loomis." Collins turned round.
"Yes, sir." Willie wiped his hand on his shirt than soil Isaac with his perspiration.
"I had no idea you were working for money." Isaac still suspected Willie was a relation due to the strong resemblance to his own brother. "Work for me instead. I need a foreman at Collinwood and Joseph told me you are a good worker with revolutionary ideas. Your skills would be important in constructing my home."
"Mr. Collins," Willie paused a bit. "I'm not an architect. I've done restoration work, but..."
"An honest man!" Isaac grinned and applauded Willie. "That's what I want, and I won't take no for an answer. I'll expect you to report to work seven sharp in the morning. A hundred dollars for the week, much more than any other contractor in the settlement!"
"How can I refuse that?" Willie shook Isaac's hand as he turned with the flourish of a man from British royalty. He watched him turn out to his horse being held from him.
"Might be interesting to see they build the Old House correctly." Willie mumbled under his breath.
9
Angelique unlocked the door to the cellar of the Old House as Barnabas, Quentin and herself entered the darkened depths of the two hundred year old edifice and lit the candles along the way. Angelique glanced at Julia's note from the wall of Rose Cottage and turned left at the bottom of the steps for the long hall past the room where Lang's old equipment was hidden. There were a lot of secrets down here from the coffin from a former vampire concealed in a dark corner to equipment and journals from a forgotten physician named Edward Lang.
"Let's see," She read the faded handwriting. "She says they will be in the room where Adam was kept in at approximately midnight on October 15, 1679."
"Does she say anything else?" Quentin pulled open the cast iron doors as Barnabas and Angelique entered before him.
"Just something that it's the same room that Isaac was held in after being held for witchcraft." Angelique set up five candles at five points as she marked a pentagram on the floor with chalk.
"I heard that story from my grandfather August when I was a boy." Barnabas pulled Adam's old cot from the wall as he and Quentin moved it out of the room. "He didn't know why he was held, just that it was a great source of embarrassment." He paused a minute. "Angelique, can you really bring them back?"
"I sent Eve back to Peter Bradford, didn't I?" Angelique remembered the incidents that were more than a lifetime ago for her. "I also followed Vicki to 1968 and posed as one Cassandra Blair." She beamed proudly for her past accomplishments even if she tried to forget the dark desires behind them. "It's pretty much the same spell, but one way."
"Who are this Eve and Bradford?" Quentin watched Angelique draw occult symbols on the stone floor.
"Another time, another place..." Barnabas had a reason to hate this cell. It represented a time in his life he'd rather forget. He must have been driven mad to keep Maggie imprisoned in here as he did with her pleading for her freedom. After all these years, and several more time-traveling tangents, she was lead to believe that from out of her confused and disjointed memories that it was Nicholas Blair who had imprisoned her in his house, but yet, the threat of her realizing the actual truth still lurked in Barnabas's mind. He still cared greatly for Maggie, but after several years, he realized she was perhaps a greater friend than as a forced lover.
"Okay," Angelique crouched on the floor in her black Capri pants. "Spirits of time, hosts of years gone by..."
"Mom!" William screamed from the upstairs. "Sara is wearing my jacket!"
Angelique froze disgustedly as she contemplated a spell on her kids. It was bad enough she had to hide her witchcraft from her kids and hard enough to hide activity that could retrieve Julia and Willie from the past, but interrupting her in the middle of a potential spell was going too far! She silently motioned to her husband to handle it as she continued chanting.
"Willie," Julia and Willie rushed for the Old House basement of 1679 as Isaac Collins and Benjamin Drew hurriedly mounted horses outside and waited to sneak past them. "We're not going to make it!"
"We have to Julia." Willie watched the two of them charge off on horseback to catch the carriage Isaac's wife had left on. "They'll be expecting us in that room tonight." He ran up the fresh white veranda of the first Collinwood and jumped on the door. The entire house looked as if it were glowing in the dark as they ran past scaffolds against detailed furnishings. Willie skidded a bit on the loose rug and rammed the wall at the top of the stairs with the steel door as he let Julia go first.
"Sara," Barnabas found his son barring the front doors as his daughter wanted to go out. "How many times have I told you not to take things from your brother's closet?"
"But he said I could!" Sara looked back at her father.
"I did not!"
"He did so!"
"You know I never listen to what you say." William folded his arms. "She caught me on a technicality. How would you like it if I went into your armoire?"
"So you're the one who's been wearing my pink strapless!" Sara tried to insinuate her brother was a cross dresser. William reached out to strike her, but his father impeded the attack.
"William! Sara!" Barnabas looked between them. "If that's the case..." He turned his head to a smoke permeating the house. He didn't smell the scent of ashes that went with a fire and then realized the glowing energies were a side effect from the spell Angelique was doing hidden down in the cellar. The wispy shades of cloudy residue looked like the ectoplasm from one of many séances in this room. Her son and daughter forgot their clash of tempers to stare at it encroaching at them.
"What is it?" Sara froze at the sight of it.
"It's the ghost of Josette appearing!" William erroneously guessed and revealed the rational ghost-hunter aspect of his personality. An excited and content smile spread to his face. "I'm going to get my camera!" He dashed up to his room. Barnabus's portrait on the mantle
fell down off the wall and knocked the Queen Anne clock to the floor. Sara clutched at her father in fear. Barnabas held on to her wishing Angelique could quickly end the spell and rid the house of all this excess mystical energy.
"Willie!" Julia noticed the basement cell of the Old House in 1679 filled with a thick bright smoke. "That's it!"
"Right behind you!" He followed right behind her as they ran straight into it. It was like an imperceptible fog that had swallowed the room. They could see no walls anymore or even each other as they felt their ways through it. Julia spun round trying to figure out where she was. It just had to be Angelique; it had to be! Something grabbed Julia as she screamed.
"Dr. Hoffman, I presume." Angelique's cheeks became rosy as she grinned. Appearing out of the fog, she beamed ear to ear as they hugged each other. Willie braced the wall appearing before him as he and Quentin laughed a bit at the two of them. The four of them had a moment of great relief and sincere camaraderie. The thick fog was dissipating and unlinking past and present as the four of them found each other again.
"I know how old you really are." Julia grinned to the beautiful blonde witch. "You gave Grace Collins fits!"
"Oh my," Angelique's childhood memories rushed to her as she blushed. "Were you that far back! I was so horrible!"
"Now we know how many candles to stick on her cake." Willie whispered to Quentin as he led the way back upstairs. Quentin wanted to laugh out loud at their costumes, but then he'd seen it all before. They emerged back in the back hall of the foyer as Sara looked at them and dropped her jaw. Barnabas rushed to hug Julia and then Willie as his son stopped halfway down the stairs.
"Where'd Josette go?" He noticed the low hanging dress Julia was wearing and the breeches on his Uncle Willie. "What's going on here?"
"You yell at me for dressing weird?" Sara copped an attitude.
"Okay," Angelique noticed a scratch at the top of the stairs from the steel door. It looked several dozen years old; yet, she'd never seen it before.
"Who did this?" She looked to her son feigning innocence.
"Willie," Julia looked up. "That's where you ran into the door!"
10
Willie managed to slip through the doors of the west wing and up to his room unseen to change his clothes. Feeling contemporary again, he showered and shaved and was back to being a modern man once more. To his wife, he might have been unable to account for his time for eight hours, but he'd really spent a week living in old colonial Collinsport without her and seeing her face on one of her ancestors. Realizing how many secrets of the family she already knew, he debated telling her the truth. Carolyn heard his puttering around and came to inspect the noise as he grinned happy to see her again and kissed her.
"Carolyn," He hugged her. "I thought I'd never see you again."
"Why?" She giggled as he looked deeply into her big blue eyes. "You're acting as if you've been away for a week. You've only been fixing
Angelique's sink." She kissed him back as she held him. "She ought to stop doing that. You're not a caretaker here anymore; you're my husband."
"I don't care if she has me reshingle the roof." Willie realized how much he loved her, how wonderful she really was and hated himself for terrorizing her when they first met, but then, he was different person back then. "Every minute I'm away from you drives me crazy."
Carolyn grinned ear to ear as Willie embraced her tighter. He was more romantic than Joe and more honest than Buzz ever could be. Sometimes, she felt she might have lost it if Willie had not been there to ease the misery of losing her first husband Jeb, but it didn't seem to bother her as much. Willie might not have had the mystery of Chris Jennings or anyone else she ever dated, but he was here and they were all out of her life.
"One of these days," She rolled her eyes. "You are going to fully explain these mysteries with which you leave the Old House."
At the Old House, Angelique tucked her old spell book in a box and buried it to the far bottom of a trunk in the attic. She packed period clothing over it from years gone by from Millicent and Judith and locked it tightly as she turned round and saw Barnabas watching her.
"I wish you'd destroy that thing." He replied. "We were very lucky this time. What if say Sara or William or even any of the other kids find it? The potential for disaster is too great."
"I can't." Angelique stood up straight as she pulled her long hair back over one shoulder. "It's just a book to you, but it's a journal of my life to me. I described my feelings when I met you and documented everything that ever happened to me. Every spell I ever cast is in it and the words alone keep those spells in check. Destroying it would revert me to my true age, transform you to what you once were and even affect our children and condemn Quentin once more. We can't take that chance."
"But you don't know that for sure." Barnabas looked upon her.
"It's a chance I refuse to take." Angelique looked back to Barnabas with the look of the old Angelique, cold, ruthless and determined with the faint tempering of a wife and mother. She broke character briefly as she beamed warmly and embraced him. He held her tightly in return as he stared to the chest with that journal deep inside it.
"It's a chance I admit I refuse to take myself." He confessed.
"As long as there is a Collins Family, there shall always be an Angelique." The female spell caster kissed her beloved husband.
END