The Great House at Collinwood was closed for the Winter. David Collins and his wife Danielle, along with their young son Aaron, all of whom comprised Collinwood's current resident family, were said to be vacationing in the Bahamas. Most of the estate's other one-time residents had either moved on or were long since dead -- all but the strange, reclusive cousin, Barnabas Collins, who continued to reside in the estate's Old House.

Annabeth was careful to bypass the Old House on her way up the hillside. She did not want to be seen by anyone remaining on the estate. More specifically, she did not want to be deterred from her goal, which was to gain entrance to the Collins mansion in any way possible.

The letter of the law, of course, would call it breaking and entering. No matter. A Sensitive often had to take such risks. And besides, she had no intention of disturbing anything. She merely wished to grant for herself the request that David Collins had denied her over the phone -- the opportunity to test her spirit-sensitivity in a house that had stood for nearly two hundred years -- and was renowned for its spirit activity. Some even said that Collinwood was cursed.

"Absolutely not," David Collins' rather strident voice had said to him over the phone. "I may be the first Collins in generations to put a stop to this nonsense, but I will stop it. No more mediums, no more seances, no more ghosts. And no curse, either. So I'm sorry to disappoint you, but there's nothing here that could possibly be of interest to you."

Nell doubted that. From what she had read and heard, the Collins family had always been notoriously unreceptive to outsiders with interests in their occult activities. But David Collins was wrong, anyway. There was a great deal here to interest her.

She could feel it already. In the earth that crunched, crisp with winter ice, beneath her booted feet. And in the house -- this towered and turreted emissary of another era that rose proudly out of the snow to meet the frosty, grey-clouded sky. It seemed almost to welcome her . _Here,_ it seemed to say, _here is someone who can feel what I have suffered. Here is someone who knows..._

A latched ground floor window gave way with incredible ease to the persuasions of her penknife, and she slipped quietly into a shadowy, rosewood-paneled drawing room. She'd half expected to find the entire place draped in ghostly white sheeting, but the antique furnishings were all coverless, as well as impeccably dusted and polished. Obviously the Collins fortune was still sufficient to pay a maintenance staff, even in the family's absence.

She paused near the massiye grand piano and listened, first with ears, and secondly with the Sight, for any other living presence in the house. There was none. She would have to be cautious, all the same. There was no way to know when the cleaning crew might unexpectedly arrive.

No time to lose then. She would begin right here, in this room, where surely the spirit of many a Collins had passed. As ghosts, they would be able to physically influence nothing in this plane. But when they had lived, what objects in this room had they most often touched? Which ones had they perhaps once cherished? Which were the prized possessions of a time gone by...? Her hand caressed the varnished wood of the fireplace mantel, evoking an immediate rush of images: faces, colors, sounds. A babble of voices from a half-dozen generations washed over her, becoming an ocean of a hundred past lives through which nothing dominated.

Something else, perhaps...

There, on the mahogany desk. A photograph framed in gold-leaf metal of an attractive young woman dressed in the style of the 1960's.

Annabeth sat at the desk, placed a hand lightly over the photograph, and waited...

* * *

"Please Burke. You have to try and understand."

"I do understand." Burke Devlin stood beside his fiancee, the girl in the photograph who gazed out the multi-paned window overlooking the sea from Collinwood's drawing room. "At least... I think I do."

"Maybe no one can really understand it. I don't know anymore."

"Oh now listen, Vicky. There's nothing wrong with admiring the past. It's only that this preoccupation you have with it is... well it's almost an obsession with you."

"Maybe. But that doesn't seem so terrible to me. It's as though the past were somehow a part of me. A very important part."

Burke looked confused. "Well I suppose you could say that in certain ways the past is a part of all of us. Or the long and the short of it is, I'm still not sure what you're getting at.

"Maybe I don't know myself. But since I was very, very small, I've known that the past would be important to me. I used to think I felt that way because I never knew where I came from; who my parents were. But it's more than that, Burke. Much more. It's as though I sense deep inside that if I stay in this house long enough, I'll find a way to touch the past. I know that's impossible. But it's still the way I feel."

"Somehow," Burke told her, "it doesn't surprise me that a place like Collinwood could evoke such feelings."

* * *

The voices, and the faces that accompanied them, began to fade then. Annabeth opened her eyes and looked again at Victoria Winters' photograph, puzzled at a conflicting emanation. This was a woman of the twentieth century. Yet she had died in 1837. Her spirit lingered in this house, irrevocably linked to the mystery that was Collinwood. Had Victoria Winters somehow found a way to touch the past she so admired? To become a part of it?

Questions without answers. Or perhaps the answers would be found elsewhere in the Great House.

Another room now. Upstairs. And another object... This one a well-worn antique phonograph. Surely this had once been someone's special treasure...

* * *

Music filled the room. A waltz, harsh, tinny and hollow in tone. Still harsher was the voice of the grey-haired man in the black frock coat who stood before another, younger and taller than he.

"Your sister is right about you, Quentin Collins, when she says that you are bound for perdition. Such music is of the Devil."

"Oh really?" The object of the reverend's derision reached out to turn the volume control deliberately higher. "Well, you would know. But then, if that were true, I'd think you'd find the music even more enjoyable than I do."

"I did not come here to be insulted."

"And I didn't allow the likes of you into my room to take insults from you. So say what you came here to say, Trask, then get out."

The reverend lifted the stylus on the gramophone away from the recorded cylinder, incurring Quentin's silent glare.

"I came on behalf of your sister Judith. She wishes to inform you that your presence on this estate is no longer welcome."

Quentin threw his head back and laughed hardily, all the more amused when Trask's face turned a deep shade of crimson in response. "You can tell my loving sister that her threats won't work. We've been over all of it before. Our grandmother's will grants me a place in this house -- for as long as I want to stay. So as much as I sincerely hate to disappoint the two of you -- I have no intention of leaving."

Trask glowered at him, seething. "Judith is the mistress of the house now. Who remains here is her decision to make."

Quentin's answer was mingled with the chime of a brandy decanter against a drinking glass. "Well I'd suggest you call in the constable then. Maybe he won't dispute the legalities of attempting to break an ironclad will. Maybe he'd even be willing to look the other way while you and Judith forced me out of my own home. But then, I imagine the price he'd demand for such a service would be rather high. Higher than you'd probably care to pay. Sorry, Trask. I'm afraid you're going to be forced to suffer with me."

"You are a thoroughly reprehensible individual, Quentin Collins."

"So I've been told." The reverend's adversary laughed again, then toasted him jauntily with the glass of brandy. "I'll even drink to it. Care to join me?"

When the irate reverend had stormed from the room, Quentin toasted the open door, downed the brandy and started the music anew.

* * *

The strains of the waltz drifted back into the past as Annabeth took her hand from the worn wood of the old phonograph.

Curious, this Quentin Collins. As Victoria Winters had been a woman of the present transported in some unknown way into the past, so Quentin appeared to be a fugitive of time: a man of the past who lived on, somehow, in the here and now.

Another mystery with no immediately discernible answer.

There was one more room; one more object she would touch today. A bedroom off the vast hall; this one nondescript and long disused. Shelves lined the walls. Shelves upon which the long-ago playthings of many children stood, webbed and white with dust. Here was a hand-carved wooden doll in tattered gingham; there a young boy's model of a sailing ship. A carousel was here, in splendid detail, ready to wind and divulge whatever secret tune it knew. And here...

Here was the toy she would use to see the past, for this one, by its appearance, was the oldest. A soldier, fashioned of grey gun metal with his own tiny musket grasped firmly in hand. Remnants of paint, the traces of his once brightly-colored uniform, clung to him in faded patches. He was old indeed, this soldier. A veteran of the Revolutionary War...

* * *

"There is a time in every young man's life, Barnabas, when he must put away childish things. A time when he must face the fact that he is becoming a man. But for you, that time is not yet."

The boy he addressed was very young -- no more than twelve. The older man -- his father?--had the stern, unyielding countenance of a schoolmaster.

"But I _am_ a man, Father," the boy protested, secretly tucking the brightly-painted soldier beneath his fawn brown cloak. "Jeremiah says that I am in every way as much a man as he."

"Does he? My, but fifteen years of life have made my brother wise indeed."

"You've found him man enough to travel with you twice now when you've carried your guns to the rebellion forces. And Jeremiah is but three years older than I. Surely next time I might be the one to--"

His father interrupted gently. "We shall see."

"But there are boys... young men, Father, serving the militia who are no older than I."

"Farm boys, yes. Urchins, peddlers and the sons of common merchants -- all boys who were permitted to enlist. But they had no greater purpose for their lives. You, on the other hand, are a Collins. The Collins who shall inherit these lands, these properties, the shipping trade of Collinsport -- and this house. Would you really choose to place all of that in jeopardy merely for the chance to have a gun put in your hands? Would you?"

It was a question asked not of a child, but of a man, Barnabas knew. Yet the man in him was not quite formed; not quite sufficient to respond as other men might have. One hand slipped back inside his cloak to caress the cold gun metal of the toy soldier. Unable to find words, he slowly shook his head.

"Well, I'm pleased at least that you acknowledge that much responsibility. It is unquestionably a step in the proper direction."

* * *

A sound. A presence...

Annabeth placed the toy soldier back on his shelf, turning swiftly to face...

Barnabas Collins.

She knew, without ever having seen him, that this was the present-day Barnabas who occupied the Old House. Yet there was something strange about him. Something very strange...

"Good morning," he said pleasantly. "Do you mind if I ask what you are doing here?"

"Not at all," Annabeth smiled, unruffled. "I'm with the cleaning staff."

"Oh? Rather early today, aren't you?"

"Yes. Yes I am. My apologies, Mr. Collins, I hadn't meant to trespass. I simply found the antique toys so fascinating..."

Abruptly, his suspicion appeared to dissolve away, and his eyes fell upon the soldier she had just returned to the shelf. "Yes," he said, far away. "They are fascinating, aren't they? The symbols of a dozen childhoods, all lost so very long ago."

"Do you know who the children were?"

He moved to the dusty shelf and took the faded soldier lovingly in hand. "I know to whom some of them belonged."

What was it she sensed about this man? Was it some malcontent, troubled spirit within him that evoked such an uneasy feeling in his presence?

No. It was death. Death had touched him. Long, unceasing, undying... Living death.

Yet the man who stood beside her was alive. Human. Not a spirit.

"Will you excuse me, Mr. Collins? I'll go back downstairs and get to work."

He seemed at first not to hear her. Then, his eyes never leaving the small metal doll in his hand, he said faintly, "Yes."

Annabeth was out of the house and half way across Collinwood's snow-drifted lawns before the Sight helped her to unravel a small piece of the enigma.

The death, the sorrow, the age she had sensed about him. They all pointed to a single, incredible conclusion. He and the Barnabas Collins of the Revolutionary War were one and the same. He had been the boy whose stern father had long ago cast doubt upon his coming-of-age. He had been the boy, and the painted toy soldier had belonged to him.

Mysteries. Enigmas. Pieces of the puzzle that stood high on the hill over the village of Collinsport, Maine.

Annabeth hoped to find answers to the questions; at least, answers to some of them. It was not impossible that she might return to Collinwood, perhaps by taking a job with the agency that contracted to clean the great estate. It was, at least, a possible way back inside, and would turn the lie she had told Barnabas Collins, after the fact, into the truth.

Smiling, she stepped onto the path that would descend the steep hillside into Collinsport. _Guard your secrets well,_ she thought to the mansion behind her. _When I return, many more of them will become mine..._
 

The End