“I’m not going to be inside any pentagrams. I’m going to be doing something that makes sense!”
In the morning, Beth finds Quentin stumbling into the house, exhausted and dirty, his clothes ripped to pieces, and with no memory of what happened to him.
“Quentin!” she cries. “Where have you been? How did you get like this?” Yeah, and how do we get you to do it again?
Continue reading Episode 752: The One Where Evan Ruins the Carpet
“Dorcas Trilling, you are a great comfort to me.”
This is the first time we meet Dorcas Trilling, sycophant and instructress at Reverend Trask’s sleepaway punishment school for inconvenient children, and within seconds, she’s working our last nerve.
“I want to stay here, and watch them be destroyed one by one.”
So the lesson, I suppose, is don’t murder your wife, because it could turn out that she’s secretly a gypsy, and her siblings will trick you into drinking a magic potion. I mean, there are probably other reasons not to murder your wife, but that’s the one that comes to mind at the moment.
“This was because Barnabas was only partly dead.”
Quentin Collins has been up all night, worrying about gypsies. He killed his wife Jenny yesterday, and as a result, Magda put a curse on him that will last all the days of his life. He’s terrified, naturally, as anyone would be, but eventually nature gets the better of him, and he settles into an uneasy doze.
He’s awakened by a woman’s voice — Jenny’s voice — calling his name. But that’s not super surprising; everybody’s been calling his name lately. He’s caught on.
“I’m not going to jail for anything I didn’t mean to do!”
Well, it’s all fun and games until you throttle someone to death, isn’t it?
Poor little rich boy Quentin Collins has been all wound up lately, because he learned that the wife he’d thought he discarded was still living in his house, jilted and angry and mad as a moonfly. So he did what any high-spirited guy would do, namely carry a garrote around in his pocket and tell absolutely everyone that he sees that he’s planning to murder Jenny the first chance he gets.
“And Barnabas will grab her, and carry her off to a triumphant life behind a locked door!”
Rascal-in-chief Quentin Collins has spent the better part of a week hunting for his lunatic soon-to-be ex-wife Jenny, vowing to kill her before she kills him. But it hasn’t happened yet, and he’s starting to get bored, so he settles in for a quiet evening of drinking sherry, propositioning the domestics, and not giving a shit.
“Barnabas is dead. He locked me in a room, and then he died.”
Jenny’s mind skips like a stone on a lake, skimming across the years. She is paralyzed with joy, she is radiant in tears.
At each point, she experiences that moment more deeply than you’ve ever felt anything. Every memory is available to her, in its most devastating form. She is more alive than you could ever be. This offer is available for a limited time.
Continue reading Episode 746: The Love Lives of Unhappy People
“What I was is not what I am. What I am is what I will be.”
So let’s say you have an entirely crazy person on your hands, and you need to keep her in your home for an unspecified amount of time. This is a common concern for modern homeowners. According to the experts, you should keep her in a warm room with indirect light, check the top of the soil before watering, and fertilize once a month in the spring and summer. No, wait, that’s ficus trees.
Well, here’s what vampire-about-town Barnabas Collins does, once he’s taken it upon himself to immure Quentin’s crazy wife for the foreseeable. He stashes her in an upstairs bedroom, locks the door from the outside, and then goes down to the basement to sleep in a coffin, leaving a note for the comedy gypsies who serve as his unwilling housekeepers.
I’m not saying that’s the appropriate way to handle it, I’m just telling you what Barnabas does.
“Wait for me, Quentin! I’m coming — to KILL you!”
Crazy Jenny has been in the attic and out of her mind for a couple of years now, and to be frank with you, she’s sick of the whole experience. Her husband, the adorable antihero Quentin Collins, skipped town a couple years ago with his sister-in-law, Crazy Laura, and Jenny took it pretty hard. In fact, she’s gone entirely loco, in that unspecified way that people on television always do, babbling maniacally and ready to kill at a moment’s notice.
As it happens, Laura is also in a murderous mood, so she gets her new boyfriend, Groundskeeper Dirk, to let Jenny out of her cell, give her a knife, and point her in a Quentin-facing direction.
Obediently, Dirk supplies Jenny with a dagger that he’s selected from the random assortment of murder weapons that the Collins family keeps in every room in the house. But then he hears the boss coming, so he bundles Jenny into the drawing room and closes the door, which is pretty insensitive considering how she’s spent the last couple years.
Judith walks in and finds Dirk, who’s desperately trying to look like someone who didn’t just adopt a pet Tasmanian devil. She gives him a couple of cursory orders, but he’s finding it hard to focus.
Judith’s puzzled by Dirk’s odd behavior, but the servants at Collinwood are always distracted by one thing or another. We never see most of the people on the payroll, but they probably each have their own weird schemes going on that we don’t happen to see. I bet the cook is currently consulting her crystal ball to check on her late brother, the chauffeur, who’s been reanimated with the spirit of the upstairs maid. Meanwhile, the gardener scuttles through the back passageway on all fours, desperate to escape from that dream, that terrible dream!
“I don’t understand it any more than you do, but I believe it.”
Okay, let me see if I have this right.
There’s a God — a Great Sun God named Amen-Ra — and he really exists, because it turns out the ancient Egyptians were right on the money. Tens across the board for the ancient Egyptians. They looked up into the sky, and they said, the sun is a boat, and Ra crosses the sky every day and looks down on the world that he created, before high-tailing it back over to the east so he can do it again with the moon. The moon is a boat too; they’re both boats. Everything in the sky is a boat.
Also, there’s a giant serpent named Apep that lurks just below the horizon, who tries to attack Ra’s solar boat, stopping it with his hypnotic stare and threatening to eat the sun. Luckily, every evening, the serpent is defeated by Set, the god of the desert, as described in The Books of Overthrowing Apep, which includes chapters on Spitting Upon Apep, Defiling Apep with the Left Foot, Taking a Lance to Smite Apep and Putting Fire Upon Apep. That will teach Apep a thing or two, is the basic attitude of the ancient Egyptians.
And according to the vampire soap opera that we’re currently watching, all of that is totally true. That is the way that the world works. The boat, the snake, the left foot, everything.
Well, I’m sorry, but I just don’t see it. With all due respect to the ancient Egyptians, there’s something about that story that doesn’t quite ring true for me.
Dark Shadows Every Day 