§ § § - January 19, 1992

By now they were familiar with the procedure: they arrived in a predesignated clearing at exactly 11:45, and waited quietly for their opponents' appearance. Leslie, her mind still echoing with her mother's words, held Roarke's hand to bolster her meager courage, feeling very much like the insecure thirteen-year-old who had first arrived on the island all those years ago.

"Punctual as ever, I see," remarked a voice, and Mephistopheles stepped out of a mist backlit in red. The flowers in closest proximity to him withered as he brushed by them, dangling lifelessly from their stems. Behind him, Michael Hamilton's battered ghost emerged, waving away the red smoke with irritation.

"Of course. You, on the other hand, are forty-five seconds late," Roarke observed.

"Details, details. If you must know, I was held up by Mr. Hamilton here, although when you're as busy as I am, it's sometimes difficult to be precise. Well, then, shall we commence?" Mephistopheles regarded Leslie with a raised eyebrow. "You look a little apprehensive, my dear girl. Presumably that means you've reached a decision."

"Oh, I have," Leslie said, nodding.

Michael Hamilton smirked. "I just bet. You have to be the most stubborn kid I've ever come across."

She only looked at him without expression, and Mephistopheles chuckled. "Just as much animosity as ever, I see. Well, there's time for you to vent whatever you feel like saying to him, Leslie. Go ahead."

Leslie looked at Roarke, who smiled. "Well, as they say, it's your show, my child." He released her hand and stepped back, as if relinquishing a stage to her.

Leslie thought carefully for a moment, then regarded Hamilton with a scowl. "I'm told you burned to death when the house went up."

"Just now noticed the scars?" he demanded.

She shrugged. "Oh, I saw them, but I didn't understand how you got them."

"I don't see how you could've missed watching me go up like a cinder," Hamilton scoffed. "You yourself said you were in the tree, watching every move I made. Which, by the way, brings me to a question I brought up yesterday." Again the cruel leer spread over his face. "One you never answered. If you knew what I was doing, how come you didn't try to stop me?"

"I didn't know what you were doing," Leslie contradicted. "It was dark, and I didn't know it was a gas can you had. Anyway, something told me I was better off staying out of your sight. With your temper, I knew if I tried to stop you, it'd be a wasted effort. And in hindsight, it's a good thing I didn't. You'd have made sure I got killed too."

Hamilton, clearly surprised by her reasoning, stared at her, unable to refute this. Finally he admitted, "Yeah, you're probably right. My intention was to kill all four of you."

Leslie couldn't stand it any longer. "Why?" she shouted. The question had hovered in her mind ever since the day after the fire, when she'd gone back to the burned-out house and realized her mother and sisters were gone forever. "Why under the sun would you do such a cruel, heinous thing? What's wrong with you? Do you have no conscience, no feeling at all for anyone other than yourself? Why did you do it?"

"Life was good for us before you and your sisters came along," Hamilton snapped, eyeing her oddly. "Shannon and I had been married ten years before you were born, and those were ten damn good years. We had the freedom to do anything we wanted, anytime."

"Oh, baloney," Leslie retorted. "Is that the best you can come up with?"

"Something about that reasoning rings false," Roarke observed from behind them.

"I'll say," said Mephistopheles, looking a little surprised at the idea that he was agreeing with Roarke on something. "After all, if that were truly the reason you set that fire, Hamilton, you wouldn't have killed your wife along with the children."

"Indeed," Roarke concurred.

"So c'mon," Leslie prodded, pressing her advantage when she saw the trapped look in Hamilton's eyes. "What was the real reason?" He didn't answer, backing away a few steps, watching her warily. After a moment a thought popped into her head and she turned to Roarke, eyes widening with realization. "It must've been the family curse."

Hamilton spat out a particularly hefty swearword that made Mephistopheles peer at him with appreciation. "There was no curse. It was just a load of superstitious hog manure. I kept telling your mother that, but she wouldn't buy it. That's what made her come here in the first place, because she wanted to save you from that so-called curse, you ungrateful little wretch."

"Ungrateful to whom?" Leslie parried. "If you think I'm ungrateful, you need to remember that you haven't done anything to warrant gratitude from me. Mom was the one who appealed to Mr. Roarke, not you, so she's the one who deserves gratitude for placing me in his safety. You're lying. I think you did believe there was a curse, and that had something to do with why you tried to destroy us all."

"There wasn't any curse, dammit!" Hamilton bellowed.

"Yes, there was," Roarke corrected him. "Perhaps if you hadn't persisted in denying its existence, you would have been motivated to investigate further. The original curse was placed upon a distant ancestor of yours in Salem, Massachusetts, during the era of the witch trials. When Leslie came to this island, I learned that Mephistopheles extended an offer to the Jamaican slave Tituba, giving her the power to exact her revenge on the Hamilton family for thirteen generations in retaliation for an allegedly false accusation, at the end of which time she was to become his apprentice should she succeed in destroying all the members of each of those thirteen generations."

"I know all that," Hamilton barked. Then he saw their aha, I knew it! reactions, wilted a little and gave up. "All right, okay, you win. Yeah, I got the curse bit from my parents, so I finally decided to look it up. I read some history texts. Since you insist on knowing, Leslie, that's the real reason I set the fire—I figured to beat that Jamaican woman at her own game. It might've worked, too..." He glared at Leslie, who rolled her eyes.

"Oh, you idiot," she growled. "You claim you did some research, but obviously you didn't go far enough. It just so happens that I'm the thirteenth generation. If you'd just left me and Kelly and Kristy alone, all we'd have had to do was survive three fires, live normal lives, and the curse would've been broken."

Hamilton gaped at her, frozen in place, his expression that of someone who sees a Mack truck bearing down on him. "How the hell—?"

"We all survived the first fire in Connecticut, the one that killed mormor," Leslie reminded him. "Then in Susanville, I survived the second fire, the one Mom found out about when she came here. No doubt you intended to be the one who lived through it instead of me, if you'd only been a little more careful about staying away from your own conflagration." Hamilton opened his mouth to ask a question; Leslie saw him coming and cut him off. "The third fire happened the day after I got here, and Mr. Roarke helped me survive that one. It was stupidly easy by then, because the curse was so old that technology had caught up with, and surpassed, the powers Mephistopheles gave Tituba. I'd made it alive through three fires, so I broke the curse—the one you claimed not to believe in."

Hamilton had been gaping at her, speechless with mounting horror, all through this narrative. Now he turned to Mephistopheles and reached out. "Is that true?"

"I'm afraid so," Mephistopheles said casually. "Tituba didn't fulfill her end of the bargain, so I made short work of her. So you see, there was a reason you had children after all, Hamilton. If you'd let them, they could have saved you simply by existing."

Hamilton, white-faced, collapsed to his knees, finally fully cognizant of exactly what he had done and the futility of it all. His head fell back and he let out a long, protesting wail of "NOOOO!" that echoed around the clearing and into the night. Leslie watched him, her expression reflecting disbelief and some wonder. Michael Hamilton raised his burned hands to the sky, gasoline can and all, and entreated to the heavens. "Shannon, please, forgive me…it was all for nothing. I'm sorry, Shannon, I'm sorry…"

His anguish was as genuine as any Leslie had ever seen, and something seemed to shift within her. He really loved Mom, after all, in his peculiar warped way, she thought. And now he's down to this—this last-minute plea for absolution. She slid a glance over her shoulder at Roarke, who watched in silence, and then at Mephistopheles, who was plainly amused. "You're making a spectacle of yourself, Hamilton," he commented. "You're a bit late to try to save your pathetic carcass now." Somewhere in the distance a somber-toned bell began to clang, and he, Roarke and Leslie all automatically lifted their gazes and looked around as if they could see it. "What's it to be, Leslie? Time to make your choice."

Hamilton had dropped to all fours and was staring at Leslie, tears streaming down his pale, scarred cheeks. His eyes seemed to have glazed over and though his gaze was on Leslie, he saw someone else altogether. "Shannon, I'm sorry," he sobbed.

She drew in a deep breath and spoke quietly and deliberately. "I forgive you, Michael," she said. "Now go."

Mephistopheles blew out an exasperated breath. "Damn it all, Roarke," he complained irritably, "you escaped me again. Saved by your own daughter, of all people."

"What are you whining about? You got a soul, after all," Leslie pointed out.

"Oh, you know I was hoping for Roarke's," Mephistopheles grumbled. "And for a while there, I thought I was finally going to get it. Ah, well, perhaps next time. After all these years, I finally have clearance to do what I will with Michael Hamilton's soul." He peered at Leslie with unenthusiastic admiration. "You play rather a good game, dear girl. It seems Roarke taught you well. Never fear, we'll meet again one day." He strolled over to Hamilton's prone form and hauled him to his feet by one arm, then flicked his fingers at the sobbing ghost's hand. The gas can dropped from it and hit the ground with a hollow thud. "Come along, Hamilton." The final stroke of the bell died away, and Mephistopheles made an uncharacteristically flashy exit, stomping one foot on the ground and causing a loud, deep boom to go off. The ground rocked under Roarke's and Leslie's feet and a huge red flame blasted out of the soil, swallowing Mephistopheles and Michael Hamilton before dying out as suddenly as it had appeared. Leslie, who had automatically cringed aside at the noise and slammed her hands over her ears, slowly lowered them and straightened up. On the ground lay the gas can—the only evidence that the devil and the ghost had been there at all.

Leslie released a cautious breath and turned to find Roarke standing by her side. "A remarkable performance, my daughter," he commended her.

She smiled shyly and ventured, "Thanks…Father."

Roarke's dark eyes went wide with genuine surprise for a moment; then they warmed and he wrapped an arm securely around her shoulder. She turned to him and gave him a long hug, sheepish, but feeling secure and completely safe for what she was sure must be the first time in her life. "Mom was right," she blurted in wonder, stricken with the realization, pulling back and staring up at him. "She said forgiving him would set me free, and it did."

"There, you see? Mothers know best," Roarke said teasingly, eliciting a giggle from her. "Moreover, you will never again have the nightmares that plagued you for all those years. You've freed yourself from those as well."

"Now that is one huge relief," Leslie said with emphasis, grinning. "I guess it's time for us to go home and get some sleep—some undisturbed sleep. Oh, and I guess we'd better take that gas can along with us and dispose of it properly."

"What gas can?" asked Roarke blankly.

"That one there on the—" Leslie turned, pointing, only to see nothing but an expanse of grass in front of them. She frowned, stymied. "But it was there just a minute ago."

Roarke quickly stifled a smile before she turned back to him and saw it. "Oh?" he responded mildly. "Clearly, there is nothing there now. Come along, child, it's late, and we do need some rest." He led her toward the nearest path, casting her a sidelong glance of amusement when she flung one last puzzled look over her shoulder at the empty clearing.

THE END

I referred briefly to the episode "High Off the Hog / Reprisal" (second story arc), first broadcast on January 10, 1981, featuring Maureen McCormick in the role of Trudy Brown. I have also borrowed the character of Mephistopheles, as portrayed by the late Roddy McDowall, from the episodes "The Devil and Mandy Breem / Instant Millionaire" (first telecast October 25, 1980) and "The Devil and Mr. Roarke / Kid Corey Rides Again / Ziegfeld Girls" (first shown October 17, 1981).