Victoria stood there watching in silence as his eyes began to bulge from his scull and black veins surfaced around his neck as he still lay in his coffin. The one place he felt the safest turned out to be the one place he was most vulnerable.
"You'll never be able to hurt anyone ever again." Victoria said in a whisper from the shadowy corner of the room. "All the evil you brought to this place...will fade away. And you will be forgotten. The time has finally come --and you---will end."
Barnabas' gasps for air became more and more shallow, he could feel the tight noose of mortality squeezing the life out of him slower and slower and tighter and tighter.
"Life wasn't meant to be experienced in the darkness of shadows Barnabas, it was meant to be lived in the fullest of light." Victoria continued as she walked over to one of closed off windows, and with the swoop of her hands she opened the drapes allowing the full brightness of the light in and scortching his skin into an ashy pulp.
It was a final blow.
Barnabas writhed in pain, the sun blistering and burning in his skin. He screamed an awful scream as Victoria watched with a mixture of fulfillment and sadness. For in her mind, this was the true end of Barnabas Collins.
As he lay back down in his coffin, his skin a ravaged waist-land, his body slowly withering into a gray pulp he closed his eyes and began to sleep.
Then darkness.
The darkness remained and hung over Barnabas like a black cloud above his head. He blinked and waited, thinking there was something else. There had to be. His finger twitched nudging up against the seam of his black pants. He had feeling. But how? He slowly lifted his hands and felt the lid of his purple velvet lined coffin, and he slowly slid it open. He was alive, Victoria's assassination was all a dream. Or was it more of a premonition of things to come?
From the conversation he over heard while searching for Maggie at Windcliff between Joanna and Kimberly, he knew that Victoria had been involved in The Organization and had now become it's leader. This caused great concern, not only for himself, but for his whole family who kept his secret. A secret that the people of modern Collinsport could not possibly understand.
Victoria knew the ins and outs of Collinwood, 50 years ago she had become one of them. They mourned her supposed death. The betrayal, the vengeance, the coldness crept into Barnabas' mind like the slow fill of high tide.
Barnabas took a deep breath and gracefully lifted himself out of his coffin. He looked down at his chest and felt it. No scars. No stake. No Victoria, lurking in the corner.
He then noticed that it was night and there was much to do and much to prepare for.
His focus, now that Maggie had gone into hiding indefinitely, was to locate Victoria and make sure her mission to destroy the Collins family would never becomes a reality.
****
The sound of a heart monitor beeping echoed in a large hospital room off the coast of Boston. The smell of floor cleaner and fresh linens swam through the room like sanitized hospital soup. David sat in a chair, his head bobbing up and down as he slept uncomfortably at Carolyn's bedside. She was the soul survivor of plane crash that killed the two pilots of the Collins' private jet and David's own son Caleb.
In her sleep Carolyn began to have flash-backs of the crash: the sudden drop in altitude, the sudden change in pressure within the cabin. Items flying all over the place hitting her in the head, hitting Caleb in the face. Then the sounds of the fuselage cracking and breaking off while the plan went into rapid decent into the ocean just outside of Boston.
She tossed and turned as she heard her own screams screeching within her mind. Her fingernails broken off from digging into the arms of her seat. Her dream felt so real, it was as if she were right there next to Caleb again as the plane went down. She felt it all over again, the water bursting into the plane from the ocean, the smell of the salty liquid was so real, she could feel it rising, she could feel herself being grabbed and pulled under the water then dragged out of the plane then.......
She woke in a terrifying panting heave.
"Carolyn?" David asked in a hazy voice waking from his sleep leaping to her side.
"Where am I? What's happened? Where's Alexandra?" She said in a panic, remembering why she had got on that plane in the first place...to find Alex.
"Calm down, calm down. It's ok. You're in a hospital room in Boston. There was an accident and the plane you were in crashed in a storm." David said trying to calm a frightened Carolyn.
Carolyn reached for her head that was bandaged from a wound, it throbbed and stung as if it were fresh. She looked up at David and suddenly remembered Caleb. Where was Caleb? She looked around to see if he was possibly in a bed beside her but it was empty. As she turned the cords and IV tubes stretched and pulled bringing her back to David'd warm face.
"Caleb." Carolyn whispered as a solemn tear dripped from her big blue eyes. She was slowly realizing the horrible truth.
David grabbed his cousin's hand and sat back down on the chair, he squeezed it tight and shook his head. "He didn't make it. They say as soon as the plane crashed, the water rushed in and filled it up and pulled it out to sea. You were found floating on some of the debris. Caleb and the pilots were lost."
"No, no, David, Caleb saved me. He pulled me out of the plane, I remember that." Carolyn said squeezing David's hand back.
"Carolyn the water filled the cabin and pulled you out, not Caleb. The impact into the ocean knocked everyone unconscious, it would have been impossible." David explained.
"Listen to me, I know what I saw and what I felt. I was there." she snapped.
"I know, I'm sorry. Listen, why don't you just lay back and rest, ok? It's really late." David said noticing the the bright red lights numbers of the room's digital clock.
Carolyn, too exhausted to disagree, accept defeat and released her grip on David's hand and sat back on the hospital bed. She looked up at the ceiling and listened as David quietly began to update her on her status: a broken leg, lacerations to the face, bruised ribs. But all Carolyn could do was think about Caleb and how he saved her, then lost his own life.
"I'm sorry David. Caleb should have never come with me. This is all my fault. If I hadn't decided to leave for London in that storm none of this would have happened. " She whispered in grief.
"He wanted to help. He loved Alex too, he wanted to find her. He thought of her as his sister, and you as a second mother. He wanted to support you." David comforted.
That seemed to help Carolyn in her grief slightly. But another question still remained: "Has anyone heard from Alex? Does she know yet?" She whispered again as David continued to talk.
Pausing, David replied: "Alex......She's home. She's safe, but she's not exactly well." David said trying to ease Carolyn in on the status of Alex, who had been locked away in a secret room by Claudia after being poised by a mystical tea that changed her appearance.
"What do you mean? What's happened?" Carolyn said again worrying.
"That woman you say is Barnabas' daughter, Claudia, she had Alex locked up in one of the rooms at Collinwood the whole time. Alex was never in London. Chris and I found her, and she's fine now. Claudia, though, has disappeared. Good riddance too...Anything connected to Barnabas ...well I don't have to tell you about that." David said, purposefully sparing Carolyn the full and awful details of Alex's poisoning fearing it would just be too much for her.
Carolyn then realized that David had yet to discover that Claudia had gone back in time to the late 1970s when her powers were potent and saved Barnabas from certain death. David had no idea Barnabas was back living in the old house.
"David, I have to tell you something." She said again in a hushed voice, knowing she had to tell David.
"Just rest, you need to stay rested." David answered now sitting partly on her bed.
"No, listen to me. I didn't have time to tell you before Caleb and I left......but....its about Barnabas. David, he's been back for a while now. Claudia, she brought him back again. He's in the old house." Carolyn confessed.
David's face quickly turned from calm to concerned. His nightmares and all that had haunted him his entire adult life and the traumas he suffered from his distant cousin Barnabas Collins felt so far away until that very moment.
When everyone believed Barnabas to be dead, it was a relief, it was a freedom the whole family felt. Like a curse had been lifted. Hearing of his revival was a devastating blow....the nightmare had returned.
David was speechless. He lifted himself from Carolyn's bed and stepped over to a window that peered out into the dark Boston night. The city lights sparkled in the distance like a sky filled with stars. He didn't say a word. His mind went right back to his childhood, to the evening he met Barnabas.
David was 12 years old, running around and exploring the old house, his favorite past-time. As he played on the old dusty staircase, a stranger walked in dressed in all black. This was a stranger with a familiar face.
He called himself Barnabas Collins, posing as a "descendant" of the original Barnabas, the man who's portrait hung in the main house foyer. The first lie of many.
The face from the painting was alive and well. David was young and trusted Barnabas. He even looked up to him in the first few years. In their first meeting they talked about the love they had for the old house. How could young David know that the man who was so captivated by a silly conversation about the views of the sunrise and of the sea from an old house balcony would bring such horror and terror to his family? How could he know the terrible things that were about to happen to him and the many years it would take to undo it all?
The hauntings. The Ghosts. The lies. The secrets. They were all flooding back. They were all reaching into his mind and exposing themselves again like a painful nerve pinching and throbbing with pain.
"David....." Carolyn's voice said from the bed breaking David's tense state.
David turned to her and smiled. He glossed over his memories and the fact his biggest fear had become a reality and sat back down again next to Carolyn on her bed.
"You need to rest cuz." he said with a strained smile. "Don't worry about me. Don't worry about that old Barnabas either. He can't hurt me anymore, he wont hurt anyone...now that I'm back, things at Collinwood are going to change." David said as he carefully moved a strand of hair from Carolyn's face.
"You'll protect us?" She said with a small tear in her eye.
But David did not respond verbally. He just smiled again, and nodded and let Carolyn drift off to sleep.
****
Sebastian Banning sat in a dimly lit office in a large private home looking over paper work. The room was filled with books covering the all four walls. A single large window, draped with thick green curtains overlooked a garden area with a stone bench under a large maple tree.
The room was filled with a dusty tense air. Sebastian frantically put together the paper work on the desk for his arriving boss to look over, on the outside of the manila folder he paper-clipped a photo of Dr. Joanna Grayson, who Barnabas killed just the night before in a tense altercation at Windcliff Sanitarium.
Sebastian looked down at the photo and shook his head.
"She got too close." He said to himself of Joanna.
"The only way to get what you need is to get in close, take, and try to survive. Maybe Joanna's problem was that she didn't get close enough. She had no idea who she was dealing with." A voice said from the open office door.
Sebastian looked up and saw his boss, the leader of The Organization, Victoria Winters. She was dressed elegantly in all black. Her leather jacket was tight around her lean trim body. Her hair in dark trusses cascaded down her shoulders. The dark colors of her jacket mimicking the darkness of her beautiful hair.
"Miss Winters. Very good to see you. I've organized the personnel reports on Joanna and Kimberly for you." Sebastian said obediently as he handed Victoria the folders on the sisters.
"Kimberly? I was told Joanna was the only one from the Organization that was eliminated last night." Victoria questioned.
"That's true, Dr. Grayson was killed, but her sister Kimberly has defected. She has abandoned her post with us and will no longer return our calls. For the sake of the Organization, the committee has decided to remove her." Sebastian explained.
"You know, when I was in the Collins' inner circle, I fought the powers that came over me, and I fought them hard. It was a battle every day to fight any urges and manipulations of the heart. That's how Kimberly lost. She fell in love." Victoria said with a sigh as she sat down on a leather sofa reading over the files.
"You believe she's still in love with David Collins?" Sebastian questioned as he sat on the edge of the large desk.
"Possibly. But that's beyond the point at this stage." Victorai said.
As she continued to read, the nature of how Joanna died was a topic of interest to her. The manner of injuries to the body were typical of only one being: Barnabas.
"No one told me Barnabas Collins had returned, Sebastian. That's a problem. Barnabas is the key to all of this. His life very existence is what has brought this organization here to Collinsport. It's what made me come here in the first place 50 years go. Now that he's killed Joanna, I can tell you he'll be back for more of us. He knows." Victoria further explained.
"I understand. We should have told you once our intel on him was confirmed." Sebastian conceded.
"Too little too late." Victoria said with a lifted eye brow.
"To be fair we only just---" Sebastian said before Victoria cut him off.
"You've failed Sebastian. All of you have. The whole point of having Kimberly infiltrate the family was so that she could keep tabs on them. The whole point of keeping David hidden away at the sanitarium was to make sure he gave us inside information. None of it happened. It was all for nothing." Victoria scolded as Sebastian sat at his post in embarrassment."But it doesn't matter now. I'm here...and I can take care of all of this." She added.
"There's more." Sebastian said as he reached over for more paper work and handed it to Victoria.
Victoria read it over carefully. She looked up and Sebastian and smiled.
"Is this true?" She questioned with a grin.
"It is." Sebastian confirmed.
"How do you know??" Victoria probed.
"Because, I was told first hand after he was sent to us." Sebastian said.
"Sent to us? Where is he?" Victoria said with excitement.
"He's down the hall, he's been sedated. He's ready to begin the treatments once you're ready to start." Sebastian answered.
"I want to see him. I want to see him ...NOW." Victoria said quickly standing up rushing out of the room with Sebastian at her side.
The two walked in a quick pace down a narrow hallway in the house. The carpet was a queasy red and orange mixture that had been hand picked by the very first leader of The Organization over 100 years ago. The walls were painted an off white and were adorned by leaders past....the very last photograph was of Victoria herself, the current leader.
Then they came to a door, Victoria took a breath and carefully turned the door knob and entered the room that was just as dim as the office they had just left. But this room had a metal table, and on that table was the sleeping body of a man, bruised and battered, but alive.
"How long as he been out?" Victoria said quietly as she looked down at her new prize.
"Hours. I'm not sure. Some of our men were keeping tabs on him, then we discovered where he was and when it was safe to, they brought him in. Undetected of course. He wasn't alone however." Sebastian said.
"What do you mean?" Vicky questioned with concern.
"He was with someone else but...." Sebastian responded.
"...And the other one? Is it possible we could get two?" Victoria asked peculiarly.
"The other's condition is uncertain. Our people didn't wait to find out the outcome, it was too risky." Sebastian said again before Victoria interrupted.
"How soon can we begin trials?" Victoria asked reading over the man's medical report hanging from the edge of the metal table.
"As soon as his vitals are bit stronger, we can start. His brain activity is quite strong. It's probably due to his age. It shouldn't take too many days." Sebastian confirmed.
"The sooner we can use him against the Collins the better. He's so peaceful sleeping there isn't he? Just quiet and calm." Vicky said sweetly combing the man's hair.
"Is there anything else Miss Winters?" Sebastian asked in his dutiful new role as Vicky's right hand man.
"Yes, I want you to find out about the other person with him, I'd like to know everything." Victoria said, then turned back to the man on the table and caressed is hair again. "And I want you to take care of him. As soon as his body is well enough to begin our trials, I want to be notified. Keep him warm. Keep him healthy....and most of all Mr. Banning keep him alive, I have very, very big plans for our friend here. We may just save this mission to take down the Collins after all." Victoria added with a mischievous grin.
Vicky was back, but this time, the Collins family had more then just a sweet governess on their hands. They had a woman hell bent on getting revenge for something no one saw coming.
