11
Sheriff Donald Taylor had taken over for George Patterson in 1973 and returned to the job in 1985 after Dale Buckley held it for one term. Patterson had replaced Ed Davenport who had died in 1971 under odd circumstances. No one had ever found Davenport's stolen remains, but Taylor believed that any day now he was going to come in and find Davenport's grisly corpse propped up at his desk as if he'd never left the job. A Southerner at heart raised by his parents in Mayberry, North Carolina, he and his wife had come to Collinsport in 1975 to live with her relatives for a change.
"Now, Maggie," Don spoke slowly. "Say it again. You got who up there?"
"The guy from TV." She repeated herself. "I saw his face on a television promo for America's Most Wanted. His name is Andreas Petofi."
"Petofi." Taylor saw a chance for some national exposure on this sleepy little town. He called out to his men as he lowered the phone. "Wilkins! Hess! Petofi's at Collinwood masquerading as a friend of the family, get up there!"
"Yes, chief!"
"And stop calling me chief!" Don turned back to the phone. "Maggie, calm down, don't arouse his attention. We're coming up there."
"Thanks, Don." Maggie hung up the phone and turned around to look back out of the kitchen. Breathing a short calm breath, she looked up and saw the big chair by the fireplace empty of her visitor.
"William," Quentin hurried up Petofi for the main house. "Come up, We have four minutes."
"I don't understand." They entered through doors on the west wing that had been locked up years earlier. "Where are we going?"
"Back to your body," Quentin hurried up the forgotten back steps to the top floor hallway near his old room. Petofi's body was heaving and gasping for breath from the two flights of stairs as the young man in it looked up and saw his father carrying his body down the hall to the big empty bedroom. No one used the empty room for some odd reason. For a long time, it had been sealed off from the rest of the house, but now the wall closing it off had been pulled down and the room was open once more. Empty and stripped of decor, it had a fireplace mantle and wide window seat with attached bedrooms. He might have liked it for himself if he and his cousins were not forbidden to come near it.
"Dad, please help me." Petofi shuffled for Barnabas and reached out to him.
"William, we are." Barnabas helped support him as he lowered him to his mother and his true body on the floor.
"You know who I am." Petofi asked. "This doesn't make sense."
"William, sweetheart," Angelique took Petofi's hand and placed it on William's heart. "This is not the time. Just will yourself back into your body."
"Three minutes." Quentin announced.
"William, concentrate!" Barnabas stared down to his son looking out from behind those hideous glasses.
"Darling," Angelique looked at the spirit of her son. "My ancestor, your ancestor, Angelique Miranda DuVal was a powerful and beautiful witch..."
Quentin and Barnabas rolled their eyes in amusement. Outside on the estate police cars were screeching to a halt with sirens going.
"Were you named for her?" Petofi's gravelly voice responded while Barnabas looked out perplexed.
"This is not the time!" Angelique shrieked with a mother's love. "She was a witch, I was a witch, and you have psychic powers you've never tapped..."
"Angelique!" Quentin was watching the time and hearing police officers entering the house... freeing Roger and Carolyn...
"William," Angelique pressed Petofi's hand to the body of her son as the young man's body stirred. "Go back to your body!"
The son looked wearily out of the old man's body and looked down at his face staring up at him from within a tranquil sleeping state. Angelique pressed her hand to his as well and willed the transference as well as Petofi gasped tired and fell backward.
"Thirty seconds!" Quentin called.
"Angelique," Barnabas knelt down. "Did it work?"
"I don't know!"
"We'll have to risk it." Barnabas grabbed his son's body by the arm and heaved him up. Petofi gasped and looked up as the former vampire dragged his son out of the room. The poundings of feet ran through the house... police checked the bedrooms...
"What... no..." Petofi staggered to his feet in the empty room. "Collins!"
"Five, four, three, two, one." Quentin timed the seconds down as Barnabas shot one last look to Petofi and swung the doors shut on the second. Closed up in the room for the brief second, Petofi realized he was himself again and grumbled angrily as he rose to his feet. Standing once more, he headed to the closed doors and flung them open.
"Collins!" He screamed angrily with every fiber of his being. Charging down the desolate west wing corridor as fast as he could muster, he wondered how they vanished so quickly. He looked around the empty deserted bedrooms and scattered abandoned furniture and toys of forgotten children and continued toward the main part of the structure.
"Collins! How dare you run from me!" He began to notice something wrong. The main hallway of the house was just as dark and abandoned as the west wing. It didn't look this way when he came through as the son. This was a house that had been empty for many years. There were no sirens outside either.
"What has happened? What is this place?" Petofi noticed the ceiling of the foyer had caved in. Weeds and branches were growing into the house as he looked around. This was a Collinwood that had been deserted for several years! Just where was he!
"What has happened here!" Petofi cried out to the derelict house. He felt a presence as a breeze swept through the open doors of the ruined estate and out the shattered windows of the drawing room. Petofi turned round and saw the odd ghosts looking at him.
Daphne Harridge stood behind the phantoms of Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes. In this timeline, they were still prisoners of Collinwood. They looked confusingly at Petofi and turned round in silence and watched them vanish before him. This was not the same Collinwood he had passed through earlier as Barnabas's son. Somehow, someway, he had entered another sort of Collinwood in another timeline with another past. His mystic senses charged him with wary apprehension and told him to turn round for the moment. Petofi looked up to the dark balcony and saw the angry spirit of Gerard Stiles looking down on him.
"You don't intimidate me, Gerard Stiles." Petofi sensed his identity. "My will is stronger. It is I that shall destroy you!"