Shadows on the Wall Chapter 24: want/need By CollinsKid ^.^.^ sometimes the things you most wish for are not to be touched. - 'into the woods (1987) ' ^.^.^ (Voice-Over(s): (Alexandra Moltke) :I want... (Jonathan Frid) :I want her back. (Lara Parker) :I want him dead. (Grayson Hall) :I want to help him. (David Selby) :I want to be absolved. (Joan Bennett) :I want to hold her. (Humbert Allan Astredo) :I want power. (Kathryn Leigh Scott) :I want what I'm worth. (Nancy Barrett) :I want to kill everyone. (Louis Edmonds) :I want what I deserve. (David Henesy) :I want my mother. (Denise Nickerson) :I want my brother. (Don Briscoe) :I want to die. (Alexandra Moltke) :My name is Victoria Winters. (Lara Parker) :I want him back. (Grayson Hall) :I want him to love me. (David Selby) :I want her to know I didn't mean it. (Jonathan Frid) :I want the past. (Alexandra Moltke) :I want...) ^.^.^ miss winters dreams again (littlemother) all the children of your children's children ...did you ever think what they're going to find? - peter gabriel, 'make tomorrow' (her foot slipped on the lip of the rock, and she fell again) The wood doors slammed open -- an organic membrane of some sinister, dark wet orifice, the place where real stopped and fever began. In here it was different and she was in the drawing room. The lights were up and blaring misty blue. Fire roared in the fireplace. Sound waves -- roiling sonic oceans -- something strange, something Edgard Varese played on the record player ('Poeme Electronique') . The windows, though open and suffused with a roaring wind, made not a sound as petals from flowers from the prize Collins garden blew in like waves -- pink, green, blue, orange, gold. And then there they *were* -- Mrs. Stoddard and Mr. Collins, wineglasses in hand, and beyond them, a smaller, younger figure, huddled in the shadows by the fire. Brother and sister turned in unison as Vicki approached. "Why, hello, Miss Winters," Roger purred, cutting a drunken, courtly bow. "Winter," Elizabeth mused drolly. "What a vicious time of year." She eyed her red wine with an air of melancholy. "Mrs. Stoddard, Mr. Collins," Vicki began dazedly. "Was there a party? Did I miss it?" "That's the thing about you," Maggie Evans, hair ebony and bobbed, hissed out from behind the couch, where she crouched like a black cat, head poking out from behind the side. "You don't miss a trick. *You* can reach around his sides, can't you?" "I feel sorry for you," Vicki protested feebly, face blanching with guilt and sympathy. "Don't you look at me," Maggie snarled, purple mouth curling into a horrid line. "I don't want your eyes." A monstrous claw reached out from next to Maggie, under the couch, and before Vicki could peer at it, Maggie laced her fingers into its misshapen digits and let herself be pulled back behind the couch. Vicki looked back up at Mrs. Stoddard and Mr. Collins. "What *is* that down there?" "What's what where now?" Roger asked with befuddlement. He raised his wineglass to his lips, but looked down into it to see that it was bone-dry and empty. A look of horror crossed his gentleman face. Vicki crossed to the couch and knelt down to the floor, crawling behind it -- but Maggie wasn't there, nor any strange monster. However, as Vicki rounded the side of the couch, she ran smack-dab into a young girl, also on her hands and knees. The girl wore a simple but expensive white-lilac dress, with diaphanous puffy shoulders. Her face was porcelain and delicate, her lips just slightly rouged with some sort of black liner. Her eyes were huge opals, and her raven hair was in a 1920's bob with a bow. She was maybe fourteen, fifteen, but looked younger. like a doll, Vicki thought. "Hello," the girl chirped brightly. "Hello," Vicki said softly. The girl winced, then brightened with carefully artificialized cheer. "Are you here for Lizzie's thing? Not to be awful; she's my sister but *such* a corpse. *I'm* the life of the ball." "Who are you?" "I'm the hothouse flower," the girl said with an aching sadness. "I break. It's my condition." "What condition?" The girl's legs parted slightly. "Do you really think these hips can do the job?" she said in a choked whisper, face starting to crumble. Vicki reached out to her -- "And I did nothing," Mrs. Stoddard said in a breaking, dead voice. Vicki's head snapped up to look at her from behind the couch. The wineglass broke in Mrs. Stoddard's hand, and Vicki realized it had been full of dark arterial blood. Vicki turned back to look at the girl, but the girl was gone. She rose from behind the couch and looked at the window, the wind still spewing petals. She crossed over to the window and the curtains, and jumped back as she came face-to-face with Carolyn, crouching behind a drape. "Carolyn," Vicki said. There was a bloody scalpel in Carolyn's hands and blood on her dress. Her hair was wild, her eyes glittered with a feverish kind of intensity. "Did anyone see you come in here?" she hissed with more than a trace of a French commoner's accent. "No," Vicki said warily. "No, I don't think so -- " "*Be sure,*" the thing with Carolyn's face snarled, scalpel pressed against Vicki's chest. "No," Vicki said again, standing her ground, swallowing hard. Carolyn's hand fell away. "Are there still heads in the streets? Those men with their steel? Oh, I know steel, I assure you -- but I refuse to let it know me." "I'm not sure I understand you," Vicki said. "Fool!" Carolyn hissed, raising the scalpel again, making Vicki step back. "I did not die. I still make my own rules." Vicki moved away from the curtains and stepped back into the main drawing room -- and nearly ran into Cassandra. Except Cassandra was on the floor on her hands and knees too, teeth bared and jagged, slinking around like a cat, circling two small figures:David and poor little Amy Jennings from the farm. The two were hastily unwrapping a huge package with pink wrapping paper and red ribbon. Vicki stared, completely stymied. David looked up from beneath a mop of brandy hair, pink scars on his neck still fading. "I want it!" he whined, tearing at the paper like mad. "I need it!" Amy chimed in, ripping and tearing. Still it was wrapped. "What's in there?" Vicki asked. "I told you not to open that until Christmas," Mrs. Stoddard called from across the room. "We want to see," the children chorused. "No, you don't," the older woman said. Julia Hoffman was at the nightstand, clutching it like a rock as so many seemed to. She was crying inconsolably. Vicki went to her. "Doctor Hoffman..." "Go away," the doctor said, head bowed. "I don't need your pity." "What do you need?" "That," Julia said through her tears, "is something completely different." Barnabas and Quentin were standing in the doorway. Vicki went to him, and the two moved around her, circling her in opposite directions, much like Cassandra on the floor -- hunter and prey. Vicki had to twirl around to keep up with them. "I want you," Barnabas said. "I need you," Quentin said. "I think we get the point," Cassandra snarled from her slinking position on the floor. "You make me alive," Quentin breathed. "You make her alive," Barnabas whispered. "This is too unbelievable," Julia murmured in abject misery, readying an injection. "I can't possibly get out of this, can I?" Vicki said, struggling to escape the two men circling her. "I gave in to the fire and the tambourines," Quentin said softly. "I lost everything. But I can *touch* you -- and you can purify me." "I don't want to do that," Vicki quavered. "I'll never know if she fell or jumped," Barnabas countered, "I had everything, I had love, I had a future. You have her heart. And I want it." "You can't have it," Vicki protested. "What is it you *want,* *Vicki?*" Cassandra snapped, still prowling around the children on her hands and knees. Between them, the giant present had become a black box, and the red ribbon had bled down into a crimson pool of blood. "I don't know what I want," Vicki said. "Look behind you," Cassandra simpered with an evil smirk. Vicki turned back to the grinning Quentin. In his hands he held the portrait of a monstrously deformed, ancient grotesque of a man. She whirled around and Barnabas stood there, fangs bared, blood on his mouth. Vicki screamed. A baby cried. The doors closed. house by the sea (qui etes-vous, maggie evans?) :WANT what's this you say? you feel the right to remain? then stay and i will bury you. what's that you say? your father's spirit still lives in this place? well, i will silence you. - The Dave Matthews Band, "Don't Drink The Water" and whatever walked there, walked alone. - Shirley Jackson, 'The Haunting' Seaview. There it was, the grandeur wreck. Symbol of a vaporized bourgeoise. Even in decomposition it looked too rich for Margaret Evans' pauper's blood. It was late afternoon on that gray, rainy Thursday, and Maggie was standing by her shoddy little car -- the annoying relic of the ashes of her home life; Nicholas had promised a new one -- and staring up from the pit of earth and rock at the end of the bumpy, ancient-paved winding path that twisted away from Collinsport proper and towards a decrepit, untended end of the shoreline. It was just her, the house, the car, the path, and beyond that, the dervish sea, full of whitewave today -- kept threatening to storm since Saturday and old Ezra Hearn now said it was to happen today or tomorrow -- and the gray, overcast sky. No sun. Amidst this misty cloudland, Maggie faced off against the monarch's graveyard. Zipped up tight in a lavender minidress with only the gauziest of sleeves, Maggie's newly-midnight hair whipped in the sea winds, biting at her alabaster skin. Her face didn't change; it remained set and determined, staring at the house like a cowboy in a gunfight. The house itself was really an epic historical document on the old Collins craftsmanship -- a huge, overly expansive front, full of gaping window-eyes that bore down on the visitor who dared enter. The doors were armored, ornate closed bat-wings. The rust-colored brick/stone walls had now really more than begun to rust; they stood covered in mud, moss, rot, even graffiti from local kids and the occasional stoner. The garden just outside was insanely overgrown, with plants and dead, mutated flowers rising up like monstrous tendrils; a miniature forest of the condemned. It was a multicolored, brown-rotted mass that made the path to the doors extremely interesting and difficult. And high at the top, rising above like a single demon's horn -- the turret-tower, looming over it all, with its single dirty, broken glass eye. It doesn't scare me, Maggie thought. Oh, it had when she was a child -- to this day dares were entertained by the local youth to go within haunting distance of Seaview. Once, when she was nine, Maggie had gotten caught in that Where The Wild Things Are garden after taking up Joey Haskell and the late, great Tom Jennings on a dare that included the promise of all the boys' pooled little army men (even then, Maggie Evans had opted to think different) . She'd gotten an ankle and an arm wrapped around some thornbushes and a tentacle of weed and had fallen and screamed and screamed and screamed until the two contrite boys finally pulled her out. She'd come home with skinned knees and cut, bleeding ankle and arm and her mother had told off both Joe and Tom and then Maggie herself, who got first a grounding and then Bactine (and later, to be fair, Irish tea and some cookies) . But that was then; now was now and Maggie certainly did live in the now. This rotted old corpse of a house was just a lot of wood and stone and supports, and it was what Nicholas had wanted -- a place he could make a castle of, and a place where he could stand on the mountain of his sins. Maggie slung her new purse over her shoulder and spike-heel klick-klakked through the overgrown garden towards the front doors. The weeds, the thornbushes were large and perversely difficult to navigate. Maggie felt prickly-pears and thorns rake at her legs but refused to acknowledge it, choosing to press on. When the weeds rose to her chest she drew in a solid, whooping breath of growing fear and charged through the rest, leaping for the doors and slamming into the old iron things with a hard thud. She looked back at the garden with a mixture of contempt and concern. And just like nine years old -- barb-wire legs. Maggie retrieved the skeleton key from her purse, put it into the lock of the doors. Stared up at them one more time, with gnawing disease. They really did look like some demon thing's caul, the last curtain to be thrown open -- (!stop it!) Maggie turned the key, and pushed. She was inside. The front hall was dark, badly lit with a single oil lamp flickering somehow, still. Faint light from the sea windows at the very dark end of the corridor. A staircase leading to a dark upperfloors. A rusted, scratched golden-framed mirror. An old-style coat rack. Several portals to the other rooms. Everything was covered in the same ratty old red velvet carpeting -- stained with water, time, filth, it lent a squatters' impression to everything inside. The oil lamp (WHO had lit that?!) swung in the wind, flickering. Maggie shut the door behind her quietly. As she entered the drawing room -- ugly, slashed-up couch; interesting sea view window ("Seaview," ha ha, funny, Maggie) ; more oil lamps and a fireplace -- Maggie thought back to what she knew of the place. Seaview, a.k.a. "that house by the sea" to the uninitiated, was in fact another Collins estate (didn't it just figure -- but no wonder Nicholas wanted it) . It, however, had been closed down in the 1800s by a Caleb Collins after various ghastly deeds. Said Caleb ordered Seaview sealed for a hundred years, and then it could only be occupied by a Collins for another ten years. Nicholas was close to that deadline, but Maggie was sure he had some legal loophole in his magic bag. It had all started, apparently, around 1845 -- when Gregory Collins had lived in the place, with his wife and their eight (!) children, aged six to fourteen. Gregory had been a man of brutish things -- foxhunts, bloodletting; he was something of a beginner's sadist. It had apparently always been in his makeup, much like his father. Gregory Collins had, as the story went, taken much of his pent-up, irrational rage out on said children. After years of this physical, mental, and emotional torture, Gregory Collins had droven his children mad, and they murdered him and his wife, their mother. As a group. Together. In packs. After that, Seaview had fallen into disarray. It had been three months before anyone knew about Gregory and his wife. And in those three months the Seaview children had lived and reigned there, making the stately manor some sort of Romper Room madhouse, Lord Of The Flies-style. Occasionally, it was said, packs of them would venture into the village and pick off an adult, or another child. These murders remained unsolved until the Seaview children were finally found out, and a cache of bodies young and old were found in the basement, in the tower, in the fireplace. This came to pass when Caleb, Gregory's brother, arrived on the scene and learned the horrific truth. He was the one that made the decision to have them all killed by poison and fire, and he was the one who supervised their bodies being carried out of the house one by one. Thereafter, he sealed it, not making much noise about just what had happened to Gregory Collins (for Caleb was among the few who knew just how much of a beast his brother was, and saw it all as perhaps for the best) , and walked away. And there it had stayed. Even to this day, it was said by the local kids and old-timers alike that the ghosts of those Seaview kids could still be seen roaming through the fog -- capering on the shoreline near the house or playing sick games of hide & seek in the garden; scampering through the woods; lingering on the path back to town. None of them went out there. And Maggie in fact hadn't since her childhood, until this day. It was the eyes that struck her first -- that was when Maggie jumped a bit and saw the old, tattered oil painting, adorned with cuts and scratches, of Gregory Collins above the fireplace. Large, stately man for a large stately house; thick bear's beard, barrell chest. Virile. Imposing. Insane. And the more chilling aspect; at his waist and knees, surrounding him, his eight children, tricked out in their finery, each wearing the same pale, neutral blind sibyl face. She shuddered, and forced herself to turn away. Looked around the old room. It would suit him -- he'd said he'd liked the decaying grandeur of it all when he'd first seen it, and that it seemed "an exceptionally perfect home for me." But still, beneath her new shell, Maggie couldn't help but be adversely affected by the place. It made her flesh crawl and her teeth ache -- something in it, some living force suffusing the lights, the furniture, the air -- was that stuffiness that of a closed tomb or of something more? She looked up at the portrait, and she sweared she could see the nine pairs of eyes boring into her, like lasers -- Maggie clenched her fists, lifted her feet, and stomped out of the living room and back down the hallway. No. This was Nicholas' place now, his castle, and it was up to her to make it ready. She looked down the long hall, and saw a darkened, immense dining room. Down there, things echoed in the wind. Unafraid and defiant, Maggie walked towards the dark void. She'd make this Nicholas' place, oh yes. His and hers. And once they had whatever kindergeist remained here would fly to the seven winds and never return again. And after that, Nicholas would weave his grand vicious plan, and they would rip that other house on the hill apart. The dark swallowed her up. */*/* one malevolent cell (i believe someone can love him as he is) :WANT The clouds began to part. Julia sat on an ivory bench in the middle of the garden, not too far from the veranda, staring up at the gray sky, finally starting to ready itself for the rain. She didn't know whether she'd stay out or go in. She didn't think it mattered very much at all. She had begun to outlive her usefulness -- more than begun. Barnabas was a human man. She had no work. But she did have a fantastic set of fang marks on her neck that came from the monster maw of the thing that still despite it all claimed to be named Cassandra Blair Collins. The trophy wife gone mad now slept in a mauve tomb in the East Wing, not privvy to this stormy day. And whenever she pleased, she could use Julia as her agent du jour, and command her to perform any ghastly act she so desired. And Julia would do it. I have no mouth and I must scream, Julia thought faintly. With Barnabas human and very much interested in Victoria Winters, Julia's only thought to the future had been to leave -- go back to Wyndcliffe, or visit New York again, or something. That thought was now amplified a thousandfold. Could she get away from Cassandra? Would Cassandra find her? Her thoughts had also recently turned to her own condition and what she could do about it. Julia's experimentation and eventual cure of Barnabas had been based around the belief that there was one, single malevolent cell, breeding this lifedeath virus that made him a vampire. And that belief had been proven right. If Julia could cure the dead man, couldn't she cure herself? Did she want to? The fact was, however, that being Cassandra's part-time lapdog was not weighing heavily on Julia's mind at all; if anything it seemed an afterthought. Her mind was fixated on her own current uselessness -- she had, literally, no place to be and nothing to do. And she hated it. The leaves ruffled, and the worst possible person stepped out of the foliage:Barnabas Collins himself. Careless autumn hair; deep black eyes. She still loved the sight of him. He saw her, and cut a courtly bow. "Julia," he said. "What are you doing out here all alone?" "Hello, Barnabas," Julia said in a heavy, crumpling voice. "How are you?" "I'm well, thank you," he said, drawing closer. "And you, Julia?" "I'm tolerable," she said, pawing at an errant leaf and twirling it absently in between two fingers. An errant drop of rain, the first of the day, hit its papery skin. "Julia, I must talk to you," Barnabas said, sitting down unasked. "It's about...Victoria." oh CHRIST, Julia thought, but swallowed a wave of bile. "Victoria?" "She has grown distant, distracted," Barnabas mused. "Perhaps it is her search for her lineage, the recent troubles -- I can't be sure what. But we are drifting on opposite winds, and that cannot continue." "I see," Julia said lifelessly. "She is the very soul of Josette," Barnabas continued, unaware that Julia was now lip-synching him without even having to look. "She is the heart of her. It is as though we have finally gotten our second chance. I cannot let it slip away, I cannot let *her* slip away -- but she is." "She's not yours," Julia muttered. Barnabas cocked an ear and an eyebrow. "I'm sorry, Julia, what did you say?" "I said, she's not yours," Julia repeated, with more emphasis on the last words. "Josette du Pres was, but Victoria Winters isn't. And she's never going to be. It's not the way she's built. She has a life, Barnabas; she wasn't raised like an aristocratic china doll. She lived in an orphanage that struggled to stay afloat for the past twenty years; I've checked. She saw children die; saw kids get shuffled from abusive foster home to foster home. Josette du Pres' world was plantations and tropics and only the finest things; Vicki Winters' world was and is survive-any-way-you-can. She's smarter than Josette, she's more mature than Josette, and she is not in love with you." Barnabas was stricken. "Julia, I've never heard you talk like this," he said hoarsely. "Surely you don't think -- " "She can tell where you belong, just like I can," Julia continued, eyes brimming with fire. "Age and time happen for a reason, Barnabas. You just cheated the wheel. Now you're a relic -- and people know it. Vicki doesn't want the past, she wants the present. She doesn't want you." Barnabas bowed his head. "Then who does she want?" he mumbled sullenly. Julia pursed her lips. "I'm sure I don't know." Barnabas drew up his cloak like a shield, stood with cane in hand. "I shall see her tonight," he said quietly. "We're going to take a walk near Widows Hill. Then, if she does not wish my company, let her say it herself." "Yes, let her," Julia said wanly. Barnabas' eyes fixed her, and his brows knitted. "Julia, you've never spoken this way about Victoria or Josette," he said. "Are you sure you're well?" "As well as can be expected," Julia said in a dead little voice. "Fine. Walk with her, Barnabas." Then, she turned away. After a few minutes, he walked away. Julia bit back the tears brimming in her eyes. No, she wasn't well -- but it wasn't Cassandra's influence that had made her say what she did. She'd meant it all. And Barnabas would know the facts soon. Because Julia had believed every word. */*/* i hate you:WANT David's eyes were laser-like, staring at Vicki from his spot lying on the bed. At the desk, Vicki sat grading his book report. He stared and stared, intense and brooding. Thinking. Dissecting. Deconstructing. Seething. In the closet, all his toy guns and robots and monsters were in a big bin and not to be touched until SHE finished. And David didn't like that one bit. "Are you *finished?*" he snapped. Vicki, unusually haggard and tense, looked up at David, giving him an admonishing look. "I would be if you didn't ask every three minutes," she said. "Relax, David." "I don't want to relax," David groused. "*You're* not relaxed." "I'm perfectly fine." "I don't think so." David flipped up, then crawled across the bed to clutch the posts, watching her from his kneeling, mid-pounce stance/spot. "Something's eating at you. Eating away, like those fire ants I saw under a rock. What's eating *you,* *Miss* Winters?" "Nothing at all, David," Vicki said tersely. "I really don't know what you're on about. Now I have to finish grading this -- " "Is it Cousin Barnabas?" David asked suddenly. "Or is it Quentin?" He relished seeing Vicki bolt upright and shoot him a look, and that fueled his voyeuristic glee, which spread across his elf's face like a virus. "Or both of them. That's it, isn't it?" "David, Quentin is very nice but I am not interested in him," Vicki said. "And your cousin Barnabas and I are just friends. We're *all* just friends." "*Sure,*" David said. "Carolyn says that all the time. It usually means she's *kissing* the guy." "*David!*" "So are you kissing *both of them?*" David theorized with a tone of incredulity. "Or taking turns? Or what is it? I don't know, Miss Winters -- " Vicki's brain was bleeding with migraine. "David, I'm not going to discuss this with you," she sighed, hand to temple. "Well, which one d'you want?" David asked with shrugging palms. "Which one of 'em do you *need,* *oh* *so* *much* that it HURRRTTTSSS -- " David broke from his melodrama posing to burst into a fit of giggles and collapse back onto the bed. "DAVID!" Vicki leapt from her chair. "That's enough. Please just quiet down so I can finish this, or it's no dessert for you tonight." David pouted. "Fine," he growled, flopping back onto the bed. "Just trying to help you sort it *alllll* out." "It doesn't need sorting out," Vicki said softly, feeling sick. "Do you know what you want, Miss Winters?" David asked. Vicki rolled her eyes, sighed, and relented. "I like to think I do," she said. "I think everyone likes to. Do you?" "I want my mother," David said simply. Exasperated:"What about what you *need,* David, do you know anything about that?" David glared at her, eyes and nose flared, and gripped the bedposts like a caged animal. "How about you, Miss Winters; d'you know whatcha need?" Of course not. */*/* oshden (rakosi) :NEED (and then there they were...) Quentin breathed that biting, antiseptic fall air into his lungs and saw the triangle; saw the fire; saw his wife and her sister (jenny and magda) crooking their hands into pagan's signs and Magda clucking her tongue like a serpent. He saw gypsies twirling spastically in singular vortexes, like dervishes; he saw himself, in the center of a gypsy circle, his head contorting into a shaggy wolf's head with a maw of gore-stained teeth; he saw a field of white flowers bloom and the moon explode; he saw (vicki) And then, Quentin saw Fenn-Gibbons and the fire again, and Magda holding up her hand full of blood, and he opened his eyes. Quentin exhaled raggedly as he sat there, amidst the trees in the woods. Not Oshden, but close -- a mystical center if there ever had been in 1897. So much had happened between these trees. He'd paid for his pride, and he'd taken down so many with him. And now here he was again, less than a hundred years later, though he'd swore he'd stay away forever. Fool. It was all happening again, of course. Miranda was back; he was back; the old players had new faces and new names. He'd wanted so much to believe David was Jamison, but couldn't allow himself that delusion -- that would lead to certain madness. Everyone back again, for another turn of the wheel. Everyone but Jenny... ...and Beth. "Quentin." Quentin ignored what he thought was a flitting apparition behind a tree, and turned to see Eliot Stokes -- standing there, framed by branches. Stokes' face was somber, understanding. "I expected I'd find you here." Quentin smiled wearily. "Come on in, Eliot. The fire's fine." "I suppose I will," Eliot said, and stepped forward to Quentin's side. "How are you holding up?" "Oh, splendidly," Quentin said. "It's hard enough remembering it all without...days like this. Days where the veil seems so thin." "You mean the veil between life and death, past and present," Eliot said. "So perceptive," Quentin marveled drolly. "Yes, that's what I mean. You get your Ph.D, Professor." "I already got it," Eliot remarked dryly. He surveyed the place, looking upon it with studious eyes. "So I suppose this spot has some significance." "Just another one of the old stomping grounds of the Animal That Walked Like A Man," Quentin replied. "This was an important place to the gypsies, though, especially the clan Rakosi." "Was this where Magda -- ?" Stokes trailed off, realizing his bluntness. Quentin rubbed his eyes. "I don't know," he said sorrowfully. "I wasn't there. I just know what came next." Eliot got to the point. "So you've found quite a lovely interest in the governess. Victoria Winters?" "How'd you find out about that? Never mind; I don't want to know," Quentin groaned. "I couldn't begin to tell you the first thing about me and Vicki. We were mad enough to notice each other, then mad enough to get together and...hurt Maggie." "Ah, yes, the unsinkable Miss Evans," Stokes said. "And how is she?" "I think she's sunk," Quentin murmured gloomily. "Evan -- Blair -- has her. He's got some scheme, and he's got his hooks into her. She's his black bride. Siphoning her pain to use her for whatever end he wants." Quentin's hands curled into fists. "I'll kill that wretched bastard," he hissed. "Well, one vow of destruction at a time," Eliot quipped. "Are you and Miss Winters still rendezvousing, then?" "Supposedly," Quentin said. "Depends on who you ask. I think it's the end of her and me, but at the same time -- we certainly don't seem to know how to stop. We kissed once, Eliot; once. It might as well never happen again." "But...?" "But," Quentin said grudgingly, "we still seem to keep coming up next to each other. I can't avoid her forever. You'd think I'd learned after all of it, but I haven't. That's my greatest folly. I suppose we are starting to love each other a bit. Bully for us." "Are you in love with her?" Out of the corner of his eye, Quentin saw a shape -- a phantom shard of his mind, a little girl that looked so very much like Amy and Nora, clad in gypsy's rags, skipping around the trees, throwing herbs from a basket of those magical roots... Quentin bowed his dark head. "Yes," he whispered. "Of course." He closed his eyes, and Beth was there -- blond, radiant, eyes alive, face still carved out of ice and porcelain. (i love you. but i'll kill you if i have to.) Quentin opened his eyes. "I need her, Eliot," he said. "Something in me needs her, just like needing Beth. I don't know what to do." "Start with not doing anything," Stokes said. Quentin licked his lips. "She ought to get away from me." They sat there for a long time. */*/* rise (loosed) :NEED hang ten honey i'm gonna go where she goes... - Tori Amos They were walking along the cliff of the Hill, and there was a deadly, implacable silence. Neither of them said too much. Vicki felt uncomfortable; Barnabas felt foolish. They'd exchanged pleasant small talk on the way up, but now, here above the waves, there seemed to be a immense bullshit filter and a stripping-away of the dishonesties. They sensed a sinking feeling. Barnabas took up arms. "This girl you said you saw," he began. "You have no idea who she was?" "None," Vicki said, grateful for something to say. "I've looked and looked through old history books, and nothing. But I feel she *has* to have been of a Collins." "What branch, I wonder?" "Here, I think," Vicki said. "She wasn't from Europe; she had an American dialect to her voice. Very young. Her hair was bobbed; she smelled like...plums, I think...something like that." "How strange," Barnabas mused. "A spirit appearing to you." "Do you really believe that it was?" "I do," Barnabas said. "I believe in...spirits. I believe they exist beyond death." Barnabas turned to the lip of the cliff. "You know, they say that on nights like this, the line between the living and the dead is very blurred, very indistinct -- as if shades could pass through the veil effortlessly. Perhaps your ghost is out here, on the waves, with the Widows. I've heard tell that if the women of the village call out on nights such as this, they can reach their dead men in some sort of sign." "I'm sure that's just an old wives' tale," Vicki said, laughing cautiously. But something nagged at her -- "Would you care to try it?" Barnabas asked. He gestured grandly to the edge of the Hill, a sly smile playing on his lips. Vicki shook her head. "I wouldn't begin to know what to say." "Then I shall do it for you," Barnabas said, turning to the dark sky. "Oh, Barnabas, don't," Vicki said, rising up to his side. "Let's not play at parlor tricks. Let's just enjoy the night." "Is that really what you want?" Barnabas asked. His face seemed pale, unabashedly honest in the light. There was something Vicki sighted in his eyes, and with a quiet horror she realized she saw it in herself -- fear, and deep insecurity and uncertainty about this trip. Were they there? Were they there together? If not, as who with who? Whose hand would be overplayed first? (he can't know, she thought. he can't. he deserves better.) Vicki swallowed. "I don't know what I want," she admitted. "But I know what I need, and that's not to ruin this evening, or hurt you." "You could never hurt me," Barnabas said softly, but she knew he was lying. "And you need to find this spirit, too, don't you?" Vicki took a deep breath. "Yes," she said finally. "I do. I don't know why; I can't explain it rationally. But I do, intensely." "Then let's try it," Barnabas said. He turned back to the cliff, and with a straightening of shoulders, looked for all the world like a condemned man, falling into the abyss. His eyes glowed. "Spirits of the afterlife," he called out, "spirits beyond this mortal coil, beyond the moon and the sea and the night, hear us. Hear our call, our planitive plea, and respond, for we seek one of your number, on this night of night's where the curtain is torn. One of you has appeared to one of us. She has come to seek you out. Oblidge her, if you will, and appear -- tell your sad poem and find justice on this strange eve! Rise, and answer our call!" The wind screamed and the waves howled, but Barnabas stepped back from the ledge, and there was nothing -- just a deafening buzz. Barnabas sighed. "Perhaps I was wrong." "No," Vicki shook her head. "No, you weren't. I'm going to try." With that, Vicki stepped forward. "If there is someone out there," she called. "No...I know you're there. I know you can see me. You were in my room, in that house on the hill. You're murdering my sleep, because you want something from me or you want me to know something about you. I can see your eyes; I can smell your scent. You'll never have a better chance than right now. So take it. Take it, and appear! I won't be so foolishly daring again. Take the chance, and let me see you -- now." For a moment, nothing happened. Vicki stepped back, sighed, and bowed her shaking head. Just then, the moon lit up to an obscenely huge spotlight on the duo, and the two stepped back, shocked. A shrieking, unnatural siren flooded their ears, and in that moonlight a figure materialized -- a figure with two huge, fairy's eyes and a dark bob of hair. Louise Collins hovered in the air just off Widows Hill, right before Barnabas and Vicki's shocked eyes. TO BE CONTINUED.