1967...

It was 1967.

Annabeth Collins sat down on the leaf-strewn steps of the Collins mausoleum and tried to ponder the enigma of this insanely powerful 'vision.' She'd been gifted (cursed, some said) with the Sight all her life, though never before had it delivered an episode so graphic, so tactile, so real as this one. But then it had, of course, not been the Sight at all.

This vision had been caused by the talisman.

The talisman...

She'd flung it away from her, thrown it to the mausoleum's stone floor in the midst of its spell because the jewel's arcane emanations had caused her pain. Was that why she had 'landed' in 1967, instead of 1986?

She returned to the mausoleum's interior and retrieved the heavy-chained necklace from its place against the wall. The stone was cold now, and colorless. And though she clasped it tightly, stroked it, even returned it to its former place around her neck, it showed no sign of coming to life again; no inclination to complete its interrupted spell and carry her all the way home.

1967.

What could she remember of 1967? The Beatles, hippie communes, protest movements, the war in Vietnam.

Had any of those things touched the sleeping fishing village of Collinsport? Somehow, she doubted that they had.

With no idea what else to do, she walked through the summer morning sunlight toward the Old House, reluctant, somehow, to approach the Great House at CoIlinwood. She found the Old House door unlocked, and when no one answered, performed the impropriety of letting herself in. It didn't seem so wrong, somehow. She was lost, after all, and though she hadn't realized it until now, she was also very, very tired.

Two wing-backed chairs flanked the fireplace. They looked soft, well-cushioned, inviting. Sinking into one of them, Annabeth permitted the exhaustion to at last overcome her.

She slept.

Hands roughly shaking her startled her awake.  "What are you doin' here?" a voice demanded. "You gotta leave right now!"

She blinked at the straw-haired young man in front of her, aware, suddenly that sunlight no longer streamed through the multi-paneled windows. Candles set on wrought-iron tiers were burning in the drawing room now, casting a yellow glow over the room.

"Come on now." The young man pulled her from the chair, urging her none-too-gently toward the front door. "Out!"

They hadn't quite reached the foyer when a familiar voice intervened. "Not quite so fast, Willie."

Barnabas Collins stepped from the small alcove that housed the basement door. Willie shrank from his presence like a beaten puppy, abandoning his effort to get her out the door. "I d-dunno where she came from," he stuttered. "I jus' found her here."

Barnabas stared at Annabeth curiously. "Do I know you?" he asked simply. "We've met. Once, many years ago. My name is Annabeth. Annabeth Collins."

That she was a cousin would mean little to him. He had never asked for her name that night of now-centuries-ago. He had merely taken what he needed from her, and prepared to take her with him into the netherworld of the living dead.

The Barnabas of 1967 noticed the talisman around her neck, and full recognition finally flickered in his eyes. "You're the sorceress," he said. "The one who vanished from the mausoleum."

"What sorceress?" Willie wanted to know. "What are you talkin' about?"

Barnabas ignored him "Why have you come here?" he asked her. "Why, after all these years?"

Desire, and the power he had once held over her, were still there in his eyes - - but something else was there now as well. With the aid of the Sight, she recognized it... as fear. It was much like the fear that Willie was exhibiting, but far more subdued.

She sensed the momentary opportunity to take control of a potentially dangerous situation, and seized it. "The spirits of this house have drawn me," she said, and knew that at least in part, the tale was true. Whatever spirits controlled the talisman had brought her here. "They are calling out for help," she invented from there. "Help that will enable them to rest."

Barnabas' eyes narrowed. "You are mistaken," he said levelly. "There are no spirits here."

"No?"

She knew better. The ghosts were, after all, the reason she had come to Collinwood in the first place. In 1796, she had seen the witch Angelique impersonate many of the spirits who might well walk these very halls. In 1986, the Sight had helped her to see snatches of some of their lives - - including Barnabas' own. How much more might she be able to accomplish with the talisman's aid, if only its evil inclinations might be controlled?

She placed a hand to it, felt it begin to radiate with a warmth that shortly became a faint blue glow. "You have a young cousin," she said to Barnabas. "David Collins. He has seen the ghosts that dwell here many times. He's even told you so."

"David is an impressionable child. Nothing more."

The blue of the once colorless stone flashed brighter, reflecting myriad prisms on the metal door of the nearby cellar. In a moment, the prisms had become a human shape. No witchly imitation this time, but the true visage of Josette DuPres Collins. Her wedding gown remained, but the hideous disfigurement that Angelique's counterfeit had affected was gone. This Josette was as lovely as she had been in life.

That fact, however, was apparently lost on Barnabas Collins.

"Please," he begged her. "Don't do this. There's no need."

"Barnabas." The ghost, its voice a hollow echo, reached a plaintive hand toward him. "Why do you hold me here? Why have you never allowed me to go on?"

"Josette, please... I don't understand. I never meant to keep you here. I swear to you - -"

"It is your love which holds me to this place."

He hesitated at that, his awkward glance at Annabeth and Willie confirming that he was uncomfortable discussing such things in their presence.

"Josette, to ask that I stop loving you... That is to ask the impossible."

"Then your love will bind me here -- always. Just as your enmity binds others."

He scowled at that. "What others? I know of no other spirits here."

"Were you so close to death you could not see it all around you? They are all here. Jeremiah, Sarah, Naomi. Even the Reverend Trask still clings to the house in which he died. It has become a house of souls."

"And what would you have me do? Banish them, and you as well? I will never do that, Josette. Never."

"Then you have doomed us all to remain..." As she spoke, Josette began to grow less substantial. In a mometit, she had vanished altogether, leaving no trace that she had ever been present.

Barnabas stepped into the space where she had been, hands grasping empty air. "It was Josette," he marvelled. "She's been here all along."

"Yes," Annabeth said. "As are the others. Just as she told you. But they are not the only spirits here. The one called Angelique is also in this house."

He turned on her, anger flashing in his dark eyes. "How do you know that?" he demanded. "Unless you are a witch!"

"Not a witch, Mr. Collins. A Sensitive. I feel the presence of the dead. I can touch objects they once owned and see brief moments of their lives."

"Indeed." A peculiar tone of suspicion tinged his voice, and he took a distinctly threatening step toward her. "Perhaps you have learned more about this house and about this family than it is prudent to know."

Frightened in spite of her resolve to the contrary, she took a step backward. Those eyes were so capable of holding her -- of controlling her. In a moment, she found she had backed into a nervous Willie Loomis, whose trembling hands took her protectively by the shoulders.

"She didn' mean nothin', Barnabas. Honest," he said shakily. "Let 'er go, huh? She won't say anything." His hands tightened on her own. "You ain't gonna say anything, are ya?"

"I have no assurance of that," Barnabas said before Annabeth could answer. His eyes held more than simple threat now. They reflected the clear desire to kill. "You may leave us, Willie."

"Barnabas, no. Please..."

"I said you may leave."

The words were an unmistakable threat, and Willie knew it. His courage vanishing, he released her and fled the room, disappearing through a louvered door beside the drawing room's fireplace.

"Now we shall see how powerful a witch you are," Barnabas said tersely. "Come here."

His eyes, deep and darkly rivetting, commanded that she obey. Struggling to resist, she grasped the talisman, hoping to find some strength in its unknown magic. There was none.

Her feet began to draw her toward him; into his hypnotic gaze, into the arms that had last embraced her in 1986, a time that to her, had been only yesterday. This time, however, his grasp was far from gentle. The hands that gripped her were vices, both anger and hatred flowing like beacons from his fingers. Fear. The Sight told her that above all, it was fear that drove him. She knew his secret. And the knowledge of a secret such as this was a thing of power...

"I permit no one to live who knows of these things," he said, as though reading her thought. "Nor anyone who knows of me. Not even a witch."

''I am not..." She could not complete the sentence. His death kiss had found her throat and had begun, inexorably, to draw the life from her veins.

In a few moments, it would all be drawn away, and she would become a part of the netherworld in which Barnabas himself had existed for nearly two centuries.

What would it be like, to become as he was, to thrive on the lives of others, to walk, not as the spirits of this house walked, but as one of the living dead?

A sound intruded on her thoughts of death, and abruptly the kiss ceased.

Dazed, she followed Barnabas Collins' startled gaze to a figure that had walked down the stairs: the figure of a stunningly beautiful blonde woman in a flowing blue gown of the 18th century. Her form was not insubstantial, as Josette's had been, but as solid and real as her own.

"The little sorceress has told you the truth," she said acidly. "And this is how you repay her for her noble efforts?"

Barnabas spun on her with more loathing in his voice than she'd ever heard him use before. "Get out of this house!" he seethed. "You have no right here. No right at all!"

Angelique Collins' grey-green eyes reflected cold amusement at his distress. "Oh, but I have always been here, dear husband. Just as this Sensitive has tried to tell you. She is not quite a sorceress after all, you see. Only a time-lost psychic who doesn't know the power of the artifact she has stumbled across. Isn't that true, little 'sorceress'?"

Annabeth's hand went at once to the talisman, finding, as before, that it could offer neither solace nor aid. It had, however, begun to grow minutely warmer.

Barnabas' confusion served only to escalate his anger. "I don't know what you're talking about," he told Angelique. "And furthermore, I don't care. I want you to leave here, at once. This wonnan is of no concern to you!"

"Don't be a fool, Barnabas. You saw what that pendant did in the mausoleum. It is a tool of sorcery; an object not befitting this inconsequential slip of a girl. I want it."

The talisman grew hot in Annabeth's hand. Was it preparing to strike out at the witch once again, as it had done in the darkened mausoleum so many years ago? No ray of light came from its depths, as it had done before. Instead, her hand was forced to flee its heat, revealing the intense green glow of the stone.

"Of what use is a necklace to the dead? How could you benefit from such a thing?" Barnabas demanded of Angelique.

"Give it to me," she replied. "And you may do whatever you like with her. I want only the talisman."

Barnabas, disgust furrowing his brow, reached for the jewel at Annabeth's throat, intending to pull it away, perhaps to fling it at the witch. Instead, he snatched his hand away, surprise widening his dark eyes, for the stone was searing to the touch, even to one of the living dead.

"Stop her, you fool!!!" Angelique's cry was too late, Annabeth had already taken full advantage of Barnabas' withdrawal from the burning pendant. She had bolted for the Old House door. She ran with Angelique's shout still in her ears. Her feet traversed the now-familiar ground, carrying her into the deceptive safety of the woods, and she did not stop as long as the woods were still around her. There was no safety here; no chance to hide. They could easily find her, by arcane means if not by normal ones, and either one of them would certainly kill her.

She cursed the talisman as she ran. It had brought all of this about. It drew evil to itself the way a rotting corpse drew flies...

Still, there had to be a way to defeat its evil. A way home...

Something snapped in the blackness behind her. They were coming.

The woods tore past her, a mad jumble of shadows, bushes, trees. They exploded at long last into moonlight, and the towering walls of Collinwood's Great House loomed just ahead of her.

Collinwood!

The answer. She had to reach the others. To invent any story, any story at all. If only they would take her inside.

She would have done anything just now simply to be with someone. Surely they couldn't harm her if...

The sound of wings overtook her before she had quite reached the house. Screaming, she went down beneath their suffocating embrace, hands beating madly at the creature that sank both claws and needle teeth into her shoulder, flapping its leathery wings in a frenzied effort to reach her throat.

"Help me!" She shrieked the words, only half aware that she was addressing the talisman. "Make it go, please!!!"  The batlike creature had reached the wound that was already open at her throat, and had begun to lap greedily at the blood there. She screamed again, fighting to force it away.

Then light from the stone began to envelope them - - and abruptly, it was not a creature at all that her hands were striking, but a man.  "Whoa... Easy there!"

It was not, as she had expected, the voice of Barnabas Collins.

"It's all right," he said to her, strong hands finally grasping her own. They were steady, reassuring hands. Warm and unquestionably alive. "I'm not going to hurt you," he said. "Who are you? How'd you get here?"

She realized that her eyes had been closed, and opened them to the sight of a handsome man in the long frock coat and full sideburns of the late nineteenth century. She knew, with a sinking feeling, that she still was not home, but that she had shifted eras yet again. "I need... help," she said miserably. "Please..."

"Anything for a lady," he said pleasantly, and helped her to her feet. "Quentin Collins, my lady. At your service..."
 

The End?