“Well, of course you have a hand. There it is, see?”
Edward Collins comes home from a hard day of whatever, and finds his younger brother Quentin swilling brandy in the drawing room. Quentin says that he needs it, after what happened today.
“All right, Quentin,” Edward sighs. “What has happened this time?”
And then this is the nonsense that happens next.
“In effect, we are going to create — a thing!”
Reverend Trask has only been married to his new wife Judith for three days, and already she’s defective. She seems to have picked up the idea that she’s actually Trask’s first wife, Minerva, and she’s determined to punish the people responsible for her murder, namely: Trask and his associate, Evan Hanley. This is not the kind of reliability that Reverend Trask expected; I hope he remembers where he put the warranty.
“Our lives are one long continuous crisis!”
Oh, man. I know that look. It’s July, and somebody needs a vacation.
“Now you’re dead, and you’re going to stay dead.”
Pursued relentlessly by the muffled-tympani sound of a beating heart, black sheep and future poltergeist Quentin Collins races downstairs to the study, to check on his dead grandmother.
This is the first running of the Telltale Heart Grand Prix, and as Quentin applies the brakes and shudders to a stop, he finds Edith sitting up in her casket at the finish line, grinning at him like being dead is the most fun she’s had in years.
So there we are; it’s happened. The haunter has become the haunted.
“It seems that when there is a full moon, legend has it that possessed children are extremely restless.”
On this night, the great house of Collinwood stands deserted, more or less. The Collins family has fled the premises, driven away by the spirit of Quentin Collins, an ancestor with an attitude problem. Now they’re all crashing at Barnabas’ place, as Quentin lures them back to Collinwood one by one, for some hypnotically-enforced steampunk cosplay.
I’ll give you a for instance. Barnabas is currently on a recon mission in the spooky old mansion, looking for young David. He opens up the drawing room doors — and there’s Maggie, the Collins family governess, wearing a complicated Victorian dress and an even more complicated Gibson girl hairstyle. She’s sitting alone in the dark room, posing decoratively on a chair and doing needlepoint, just Gibsoning away.
When she sees Barnabas enter the room, she’s startled, and acts like she doesn’t know who he is. “I know no one named Barnabas,” she says, “now please leave here at once!” He insists, “Maggie, I know what’s happened to you,” which says a lot about how Barnabas’ mind works.
She says that’s not her name, but when she tries to remember who she is, she gets confused, shrieks, and crumples delicately to the floor.
When she regains consciousness, Maggie is herself again, and she has no idea what happened. “These clothes,” she gasps, “where did they come from? And my hair! Barnabas — why don’t I remember?” This must have been a pretty action-packed evening for her; you don’t forget a hairstyle like that in a hurry.
So it turns out that Quentin is really, really good at this. He must have a master’s degree in whatever the hell this is.
“She isn’t anywhere anymore, not anywhere at all.”
“Barnabas!” Maggie yells, sprinting down the Old House stairs with an antique telephone in her hand.
“The children!” she cries. “They’re gone! They’re GONE!” There’s two kids, so that makes one gone apiece. Yeah, the math checks out.
Now, viewed purely from the host’s point of view, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The entire Collins family evacuated Collinwood last week, to escape an outbreak of ghost hostility. So everyone’s crashing at Barnabas’ place for the indefinite future, which is very neighborly and a nice boost for the sharing economy, but it’s got to be hard on the guest towels.
I mean, if you’ve ever had four relatives come to visit all of a sudden, bringing along adopted children, itinerant blood specialists and assorted domestics, then you can forgive Barnabas wondering, just for a moment, if misplacing a couple houseguests might help to thin out the traffic around the bathroom facilities.
“Collinwood belongs to the ghosts now.”
For the first time in two centuries, the Collins family has left Collinwood. Well, the living ones have, anyway. The dead members of the family — the silent majority — are in the same place they’ve always been, and the fact that you don’t even think of them as part of the family is kind of the problem.
But the living Collinses are now living elsewhere, taking up residence in the other enormous mansion on their property. They’re trying to keep their kids out of the clutches of their avenging ancestors, with limited success.
The morning after the great exodus, Chris stops by, and tells Barnabas and Maggie that he saw someone standing at the edge of the woods, staring at the Old House — someone wearing old-fashioned clothes.
Maggie gasps, “Quentin?”
Puzzled, Barnabas asks, “What did you say?”
“Quentin,” she repeats. He frowns, and says, “Where did you hear that name before?”
So these people have been under siege for several months, held two seances, lost a silversmith and a perfectly good medium, staged an exorcism and then scurried off to find other accommodations, and most of them don’t even know that the specter responsible is named Quentin.
Seriously, the living are ridiculous. Can you believe these clowns?
“If I were a ghost, as I assume someday I shall be, I would not let mere words drive me away from my home.”
This morning, occult expert and exorcism consultant Professor Eliot Stokes woke up to the sound of a crow perched on his windowsill, muttering Russian slang words with the voice of a human child. Touching each of the eight protection stones that surround his bed, Stokes got up and went about his usual routine: selecting an amulet, sweeping away the animal bones that appear each night in his fireplace, and reading the news in the swirls of cream in his coffee.
The omens weren’t particularly favorable, although he made a mental note to brush up on his Russian. Apparently, by evenfall, he would do battle with a powerful energy source for the soul of a young person whose name begins with the letter D. The encounter would end in defeat, fire, and the irreparable loss of innocence.
Still, you never know, he mused, adjusting his necktie. You might get lucky.
“They become just as helpless as this pencil.”
Dr. Julia Hoffman comes home to her luxurious mansion, which belongs to other people. She’s brought a friend, a handsome young serial killer named Chris. They’ve just had an unpleasant afternoon with Chris’ ex-girlfriend, who was traumatized by Chris several years ago to such an extent that she no longer moves or speaks.
Chris is a little uneasy after the encounter, but Julia’s in full Murder Club mode, telling him that Sabrina still can’t speak, so she can’t identify him to the police. This is Julia’s idea of reassurance.
After Chris leaves, she’s joined by Professor Eliot Stokes, another dangerous houseguest who’s snapped his leash and is now wandering around at will, drinking other people’s liquor and planning unholy rituals in other people’s back gardens.
“I’m glad you’re here, Julia,” he smiles. “I’m going to exorcise the ghosts from this house tonight, and you are going to help me.” This is what Julia’s life is like, just one damn thing after another.
“It was just me. I was pretending to laugh like a man.”
Dark Shadows lost one of their writers a couple weeks ago; I may have mentioned that before. Don’t worry, he wasn’t one of the good ones.
There’s a new writer who’s going to join the team in March, but meanwhile there are a couple extra scripts that need writing. They need a fill-in writer for the next two episodes, so Gordon Russell calls Ralph Ellis, who wrote ABC soap A Flame in the Wind with Gordon from 1964 to ’66.
Ralph is just at the beginning of a long and successful career as a soap opera writer. Pretty soon, he’s going to join NBC’s Another World, and then CBS’ Search For Tomorrow, and eventually he’ll be a head writer for The Doctors, As the World Turns, Loving, and General Hospital.
Right now, he’s doing a couple days on this weird little haunted house show. Let’s see what he comes up with.
Dark Shadows Every Day 