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| The Old House: Evangeline spies on Cameron |
The light of a single candle flickered in a strange cold stream of air that filtered in through the crevices and cracks in the basement of the old house. The wax slowly dripped down the white candle and over the silver candle stick falling and instantly hardening.
It was a perfect circle of wax. Round with no breaks in it's surface.
"Wake up, Claudia Evangeline. Wake up." A voice demanded from the shadows of the room. "Wake up and take control."
Evangeline's eyes blinked open. She had fallen asleep next to the vampire she knew as Leopold but when she turned over, he was not in bed. She squinted, her eyes still weak and blurry from sleep to see who was speaking with her. Then, in the flickering of the single candle, the silhouette of Bathlem, the witch who took her in as a baby, stepped forward into the orange glowing allowing it to illuminate half of her face.
"Mother Bathlem! You came back." Evangeline asked rushing over to Bathlem who transparent in her bodily form. Evangeline could see the wall behind the supreme witch's body.
"These weeks as I have come and gone and watch you, I have seen you falling in love with this creature Leopold just as your mother fell for Barnabas. The trap of love and lust can be alluring, my child, but it can also be deadly. I tried not to disrupt the natural flow of your life and have attempted to guide you...but I have seen you in the last few weeks defeat yourself with the powers of love." Bathlem replied.
"I don't know what to do. I have tried so hard to unlatch myself to Leopold, I know that I must leave, UI know that I could muster all the energy in my body and just go ....but I haven't been able to do it. I question myself. What if this is the only person that will love me?" Evangeline finally confessed.
"It is not meant to be Evangeline Claudia. There is more for you and in your life to come. This," Bathlem said looking around the dark layer below the old house "is not your destiny. You know this."
"He and I have a connection, like nothing I have ever felt before and I ..." Evangeline paused...."I've needed something like this in my life. I felt like a desert and when Leopold came into my life I suddenly felt like I was dancing in a rain storm. It felt good." Evangeline said, expressing a sense of happiness that she had never felt before. Especially with a man.
Bathlem took a deep breath. It was a similar conversation she had with Angelique Bouchard just before Angelique began her journey to Collinsport from the island of Martinique hundreds of years ago. Love was, by all accounts in all the world, the most powerful magical spell ever. And Evangeline was just another one of it's victims.
"We often times only see what we want to see even though the truth is lurking around every corner ready to remind us its all a trap. My child, you have fallen prey to this trap just as your mother before you....and myself." Bathlem confused, as she flattened the front of her nun's habit.
"You were in love once?" Evangeline asked.
"I thought I was. I thought he loved me too. But our two journeys, much like yours and this Leopold's did not connect. They ran parallel. And that is not a journey I want for you. You deserve more and will get more. But not here. Not with him." Bathlem said, finally telling Evangeline the truth.
"I have seen his dark side, a side that I know now ..." Evangeline began before Bathlem interrupted.
"Now? Now you doubt him. He's kept secrets from you and he's kept you prisoner. How does that feel?" Bathlem asked as she sat on the bed, her body still transparent.
"I don't know." Evangeline said turning away embarrassed.
"Foolish child. You are much your mother's daughter. Love took from her too. Her life. Her passions. They were all amenities she frolicked in only to be bitten by the disaster of Barnabas Collins --killing her. And now you frolic in those same treacherous waters. A witch cannot love a vampire and live to tell the tale. It is futile, my child. It is suicide." Bathlem explained.
"What do I do? How can I my journey back on track Mother Bathlem? I've fallen so far behind in my quest for my father that....." Evangeline paused again. "I fear I may be too late. That it's all over for me. My destiny to finally confront Barnabas, my father is over. He's won. He's won."
Bathlem chuckled a deep and breathy chuckle.
"So young. So foolish. So blind." The witch dressed as the nun said.
Bathlem looked at the young girl she raised in an orphanage for centuries and put her hand on Evangeline's perfect white face. They were close. Like mother and daughter, and Evangeline did see Bathlem as a surrogate for Angelique. She had to. Bathem was all she had all her life.
Bathelm then turned and pointed to a chamber adjacent to the basement. Evangeline looked confused but followed where Bathlem was pointing. "There you will find the truth that has been staring you in the face this whole time. Nothing is as it seems. In this realm, it never is."
The younger sorceress walked into a chamber where Barnabas' coffin was. She looked at it with a deep pain in her heart. She lifted the lid---it was empty.
Evangeline's child like heart hoped that Barnabas was there. Laying in his vampiric slumber or perhaps Leopold would be there waiting for her to tell her that he loved her and that he would protect her and help her somehow, some way find Barnabas so she could finally end him and his control over her mind and her soul that was trapped for generations in the world of the living because of their unfinished business in the world of the living.
But only the soft fold of the velvet lining looked up at Evangeline from inside the coffin. She caressed them and felt their soft edges as a whimper of sadness peeked out from inside her chest.
As she came back into the room disappointed that Bathlem had sent her into the coffin chamber to see that she was truly alone, she saw that Bathlem had left her.
Vanished into thin air. but not without leaving another clue to the truth.
A single candle, lit by Bathlem before she vanished, burned inside a third chamber off to the other side of the basement.
Confused, Evangeline then pitter-patted her bare-feet over to the third chamber in the basement where she could see the candle burning, like a beacon, a lighthouse, luring Evangeline in. It was in this room that Noelle had set up refrigerators filled with hundreds of pints of blood. It was Leopold's blood supply room.
Evangeline shifted around the empty plastic blood containers unsure as to why Bathelm had pointed her to go into this room with the single candle. Leopold, as Justin was calling himself, had gone out to find more of the red liquid and Bathlem knew this was the time for the truth to finally be told.
As Evangeline sorted through Leopold's things a single box had been left out in the open for Evangeline to find. She slowly walked over to the box, it was a pale brown with a perfectly fitted top. She reached out her hands and touched the lid. She slowly lifted the lid and found several news paper clippings. that read:
JUSTIN PATTERSON MISSING
Evangeline then noticed the date of the papers and also the photos of the person the news reports mentioned. Justin Patterson, the man missing, the man from 1966 that was feared dead was also Leopold, the vampire. Noelle had hidden him all this time and no one knew who he was.
Evangeline was not the only one using a fake name. He was not who he said he was. He was not of this time. He was not the man he pretended to be. He was a liar. A conniver. He had no intention of being who he was and telling her the truth about how he came to be who he was. The year 1966 was not foreign to her. She knew exactly what that year meant in terms of Collinsport lore and history.
It dawned on Evangeline that the only way this Justin person, going by Leopold, could be a vampire from 1966, 25 years ago, was that if another vampire in that year made him that way.
Evangeline deduced that Leopold was a yet another victim of her father's, Barnabas Collins. Yet another name to add to the list of the violated and blood drained. Except this victim Justin, Evangeline believed true, became cursed to live forever just as Barnabas.
Evangeline could not hold her tongue no more. She began to fume and let out a giant scream that shook the walls.
The monstrous act of the fatal bite of Barnabas’ making Justin one of the undead too tore her in shreds. Her own father made this man what he was. And although she knew Justin was bad for her, she still DID love him. And she pitied him. And she mourned him.
Evangeline suddenly felt sick. She instantly felt revolted and vomited on the floor in disgust. Her heart was pounding at realizing her father did this, that her father made this man a monster. The tears began to fall and she dropped the lid of the box back in its pace and rushed out of the room wrapped herself with a large black scarf she found on the back of a chair and slowly made her way, barefoot, up the stone staircase that lead into the Old House to finally free herself of the horrors of this basement.
Evangeline would never truly know what happened in 1966 the nights Justin became Leopold. Evangeline, who blamed her father rightly for her own abandonment and remove from her mother’s arms at birth, for the death of her wicked mother too, for her wrongful exile and extinction from the Collins family tree... would never ever know Angelique Bouchard was truly to blame for Justin’s transition into the monster he was after invading and possessing the body of Arabella Stoddard and tore at his neck for his blood.
Once more Barnabas would be blamed for a crime he didn't commit. And Evangeline would hate him even more deeply for it for the rest of her life.
Upstairs in the old house, another love story was freezing.
"Is there anything I can do for you?" Lucas said, sitting next to his sobbing boyfriend Cameron in the Old House drawing room the day after Cameron had just cremated his aunt Noelle after her death.
Cameron was inconsolable. He was devastated about her death. His whole life all he knew was Noelle. She was not only the woman who raised him but she was also his friend. His confidant. In the last month their relationship had become strained and things were painful but he loved her just the same.
Evangeline reached the exit of the basement but stopped, hiding herself in the hallway to listen to Cameron and Lucas.
"I don't know what to do. I don't know what I'm going to do now that I'm alone." Cameron said through tears and clutching a throw pillow to his chest.
"You're not alone. You have me." Lucas replied.
Cameron turned and looked at him. He leaned over and kissed Lucas on the lips softly then turned away.
"I think you should leave." Cameron said.
"Leave? I can't leave you like this? I want to be here with you I want to be here for you." Lucas answered.
Cameron clutched the necklace around his neck that Lucas had found hidden in the walls of Collinwood that was on Cameron's father's body. It was not only a reminder that his father was dead but also a reminder that Lucas and Noelle had gone behind his back and went into Collinwood searching for answers. Cameron still felt betrayed by Lucas. He felt like there was a lack of trust floating around them both and even though he needed to be with the man he loved, he couldn't. He needed Lucas to leave. He needed space.
"I think I just need to be alone right now. I just need to be here, in this place for as long as I can until the Collins' ask me to leave. But Alone." Cameron said still gripping the necklace.
"Cam, this is your home too. They're your family. If you just tell...." Lucas began before Cameron interrupted.
"Stop. Just stop. I need you to stop." Cameron said clearing away the tears from his face and clutching his Aunt Noelle's urn. "At this point if Carolyn was meant to know me, and how she and I are connected it would happen. I don't want ...." He paused and looked up at the portrait of the mysterious Barnabas over the mantle.
The fireplace snapped and sparked under the painting glowing a bright light that reflected from under Barnabas into the eyes of his hiding daughter Evangeline as she listened to Cameron and Lucas talk.
"If it's meant to be that I somehow come back into their lives. It'll happen. I'm not forcing anything at this point. Look where forcing things got us. Look where pushing and pushing and pushing got us! No. I think I'm going to let things be. Just as they are." Cameron finally confirmed.
Lucas got up and kissed Cameron on the head. He held on to him for as long as he could but Cameron wouldn't budge. It was clear that there was a strain on the relationship and it might not survive.
Lucas walked over to the Old House's foyer and put on his coat and scarf. A light cool gust of air blue over the exposed parts of his neck. He instantly got goosebumps and looked behind him. On the floor was the scarf Evangeline was wearing. Justin's scarf.
Lucas went over and picked it up. Then walked back towards the entrance of the drawing room and saw Cameron sitting in a a comfortable chair that he had moved closer to the fire place. The light of the fire flashed a bright light on Cameron's perfect face and Lucas's heart skipped. He loved him, but he knew that things were bigger than Collinsport, and perhaps bigger than his life with Cameron.
As the front door of the Old House closed behind Lucas, Cameron felt the same cool air come across the skin of his arms. He looked down and saw the hairs standing up on their own. He shuttered. Then the air came again, this time stronger and it blew on the fire in front of him.
Cameron got up and turned around to see the witch Evangeline staring him in the face.
"What ....? Who are you....What are you doing here?" He asked her.
"You're in pain. I can feel it." Evangeline said.
"Who are you?" Cameron asked again this time more forcefully.
"What is making you feel this pain?" She asked.
Cameron looked at her closer in the face. The light of the fire again flickered bright and then he realized he did know her. Not personally, but he did know her face. She was Caleb's governess. He had seen her in passing while Noelle worked at the mansion. She seemed different in the dim light, but he was sure she was the woman who had gone missing weeks and weeks ago.
"You're....the missing governess! What are you doing where? Have you been here this whole time? Oh my god we have to call David and tell him you're ok. Didn't you know the family thought you abandoned your job suddenly?" Sniffled Cameron motioning to the phone on side table.
She lifted her hand up in the hair and Cameron froze in place.
"Stop." She said as even the clocks stopped ticking away time.
Cameron just stared at her. She could feel his deep pain, the hurt over all the horrible secrets revealed, the betrayal by his boyfriend Lucas and even by Noelle. She could almost taste how much pain he was in.
"What....are you doing?" Cameron asked through a clinched and frozen body.
"Pain. I know it so well. I too have felt this type of pain and for some reason yours is burrowing into me as if it's my own. I don't know why." Evangeline said.
"You're not answering my question, Evangeline, what are you doing in my house?" He asked.
Evangeline paused before answering. She had been going by her birth name Evangeline for so long that she had forgotten that she had a different identity all together. One that mother Bathlem and the nuns had given her. The name of a daughter of the Coven.
"Claudia." She said softly.
"What?" Cameron asked, his mind was a mess of confusion and sorrow. "Answer me!" He repeated.
"I am Claudia Bouchard. Daughter of Barnabas. Daughter of Angelique. My pain is real. Just like yours. It burns inside of me, I think we are similar and I feel your pain so real. So cold. And because of that Evangeline is dead. I am Claudia Bouchard." She said.
The pain that she felt in that room was like no other. She had been hidden away in the basement for so long that she had forgotten what it was like to feel and sense other people's emotions. She needed to feed off of other's real life emotions to tap into her own and grow her powers to grow her feelings to grow as a person.
Claudia closed her eyes slowly and lifted her hand in front of Cameron's face and in Latin said:
"Nunc somnum. Somno. Nunc somnum. Sonmno."
Cameron's eyes began to close. He began to feel his whole body go limp. As he fell Evangeline, now going by her adopted name Claudia, grabbed him and placed him on the sofa.
Cameron fell asleep. He would rest now, and the pain of losing his aunt Noelle would ease over time, but it would never vanish completely. What's more, he would wake in the morning not remembering seeing Claudia at all.
Claudia turned back once more to see him sleeping soundly. She then opened the door and quickly began to make her way over to the bigger mansion the Collinwood grounds.
****
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| Tragedy at Widows Hills |
Claudia, reinstating herself with the name the nuns gave her, gathered her self just outside the steps of the Old House. She took a deep breath of salty sea air and began her short distance journey back to the main mansion where she worked as Caleb's governess.
But she could not be detected. She could not return and behave as if nothing happened.
She had to return to the mansion and hide. Hide herself until the moment was right and strike again. She would wait out her father Barnabas' return, no matter how long it would take. No matter how many years. Decades. Centuries. All she had now, was time.
As the wind from the sea crashed through the bare branches of the woods around the two homes on the Collinwood land, Evangeline could feel a sense that she was not alone, in fact she expected it. This was the moment that clutched at her throat like a winter morning.
She felt eyes. Hungry. Cruel eyes. She felt the cold of something staring at her. Vicious and monstrous. These cold eyes gazed at Claudia who's curls were floating in each gust of wind like the guilded sail of a ship. She knew who it was.
Leopold...Justin. The vampire she almost gave up her destiny for. The man she felt so connected to but knew that their love could not be. It would not last and it most certainly would self district.
"A witch cannot love a vampire and live to tell the tale." She heard echo in Bathlem's voice.
"Your eyes will forever sear into my soul....Justin." Claudia said using Leopold's real name to his surprise.
Justin leapt from his shadowy spot behind large oak trees and bushes and hissed with a mouth full of sharp teeth that were framed with lips stained with animal blood that Justin had sought out for nourishment.
"You'll never escape me, we deserve each other. We're meant for each other." He growled.
Claudia turned to see his carnivorous and bloody face. Even in his grotesque transition she still could see the kindness in his eyes. His human attribute felt warm and loving. It was still there. The spark of humanity that made Justin Justin. This spark killed any coldness that was the vampire inside him he named Leopold.
Claudia began to glow, showing him her powers were coming back, slowly but surely. It was a warning sign to him. A signal that she was not to be toyed with.
"Things should not have been able to get this far, I never should have allowed them. My father did this to you, and I cannot be with a man, a monster, a creation of my father's doing. He did this. He made you this creature. He pushed his curse on to you. You deserve better Justin, I deserve better. Can’t you see? Can’t you see that we cannot and should not continue to spiraling chaos that destroyed my own parents? Justin... we will kill each other. We will die not because our love is strong but because it will be in our nature.” She said to Justin in all sincerity and to his confusion of her openness.
"But I wasn’t ....." He began to explain about Arabella but Evangeline stopped him.
"You won’t persuade me to think different of us. There is no us. You transferred your love for India do Arco on to me. Another of my father’s victims. I don't know if our suddenly passion was ever real Justin. I don't know if we were ever meant to be. I thought it loved you too...Maybe I do, I don't know but we're impossible together. Don't you see? We can never be together. Ever. We'll die." Claudia explained.
Justin, his eyes and mouth finally returning to human form as best it could, looked over at this woman, this beautiful kind woman that had so much hurt and pain running around in her as she had the blood of a witch and a vampire. She was him--he was her. He knew it. He wanted it. He wanted it now.
"I can't accept that. I cannot. I WILL NOT!!" Justin screamed. His frustrations ending in a rogue flash of lighting that exploded in the far off hills of Collinsport but lit up the sky like the sun had come out.
"You have to. There's no other way. In this life, we don't belong together. In this world, in this universe, it cannot be." Claudia said as she began to turn allowing the wind to blow in her face.
"You're just giving up? Even though you feel this connection too? How can you do that? How can you just give up on us. We have so much potential for more. Evangeline...." He said before being interrupted.
"Don't call me that! I don't want to be known as that name ever again. I never want to her the name Barnabas Collins gave me." She screamed.
He was confused. He was getting his heart broken all over again. First in the 60's by Carolyn and Maggie, then India and now Evangeline, the one woman he thought would be with him for eternity because of their mutual connection to the world of the supernatural.
"My name is Claudia Bouchard, and I am the daughter of Angelique and Barnabas. I have a mission to find my father, find him and destroy him for all he's ever done. I cannot allow you to stop me from this. No man will stop me from this." Claudia said, her heart pounding in her ears, her blood racing. The flashes of lighting splashing on her face like flashes from a camera light bulb.
"I will never accept that. If I cannot have you, NO ONE WILL!" Justin said as he lunged for Claudia with his mouth gaping ready to bite down on her skin that would ultimately be poison for him and kill her.
With her powers she blocked him, he stood in mid air floating, gasping to breath. Gasping for release.
She held him in place floating like that for only second but he began to suffocate. The lighting flashed again , this time lighting his face, a tear was falling down his cheek and it glistened in the flashes of lightening. A real, tear. A human emotion peeking through his cold violent vampire veneer.
She too began to feel the hurt of the moment too, her heart felt like a vase, shattering into a million pieces.
Their short lived love affair was collapsing like a house of cards or a castle made of sand.
And it was because of her.
"It's over. This......this thing... it was not meant to last." She said as she released him and turned to go to the main house. He fell to the ground panting, pulling in large deep breaths into his lungs.
As she continued on her walk, she came across the final orchard of large tress that were flowing in the wind just yards away from the edge of Widow's Hill. She did not feel Justin's eyes on her anymore. She could only see the waves crashing up against the rocks below the cliff side of cliff side.
Crashing like powerful forces of nature that exploded just below her. The pounding of the dark blue waves that became electric when the distant lighting flashed over them spewed small bits of water up into the air and on her skin.
Suddenly a flash of lighting sparked brightly in her eye and in the split second flash Justin lunged at her again from out of no where, deep in the shadows.
They rolled around on the edge of the grassy cliff of Widow's Hill. He wanted to kill her with his bite. She fought him with all she could. Her hand was on his neck. He pushed and pushed himself on her attempting to bite her flesh with his fangs. He wanted her blood. He wanted her blood to kill him and his bite kill her. Like a deadly final kiss that would destroy them both. An unhinged lover who would do all he could to satisfy the urge to end things forever for the both of them.
This is what Bathlem warned her about. His rage. His callousness. His visceral thirst for her blood to then end it all.
Their two energies, vampire and witch was a toxic force. Toxic, volcanic and explosive. Destined to die no matter what.
Claudia pushed her body and struggled with the man whom she felt loved her and whom she felt she could love back---in a different world.
Finally, she lifted her knee that was under his stomach and plunged it deep into his belly launching him over the cliff.
She rushed over to the edge and saw him screaming for her to help, hold on tightly to a root of a tree that had peirced the side of the cliff. She was crying and wasn't sure what to do.
"HELP ME!!" He screamed as one hand held on to the large root coming out of the side of the cliff and the other reaching for her.
She reached down, but it was too late. The root have out, sliced off the edge into a perfect sharp stake and Justin feel to the bottom of the cliff. The thick root, sharpened at the edge like a knife fell deep into his chest and into his heart killing him instantly.
She screamed too. A she looked over the cliff, she could not see him.
The black waves washed up on the rocks. But she still could not see Justin.
"LEOPOLD!!!!!!" She screamed using the name she fell in love with.
Then a flash of lighting came again and she saw him, the sharpened root that had ripped from the side of the cliff that he was hanging on has staked him directly in the heart killing. His blood spilled from his body into the splashing water all around him tainting it in swirls of crimson and scarlet bubbles.
He was dead.
Then darkness again. And Evangeline was wailing in grief. She continued to stare down at the bottom of Widow's Hill hoping that when the lightening flashed again she would see him up on his feet and alive. But when the lightening flashed again, Illuminating the rocks below Evangeline saw the rocks were shockingly bare of his body.
Justin had been washed away by the black waves and taken into the sea to sink to the darkness and cold water never to be seen again.
Evangeline was inconsolable. She covered her face with her shall and screamed a bloodcurdling scream. How cruel the world was. To her she knew they were no good for each other but then ache of his death was no less of a pain in her heart. His devastating Death was no less a shock, a lashing, a painful reminder was truly now... alone.
She cried until the snot in her nose spewed all over her hands. She destroyed him. She could not be with him but she also could not stand the fact that he was dead and that she and her father had done this to him in the first place.
Was she as guilty as her father??
"A witch cannot love a vampire and live to tell the tale." echoed Bethlehem's voice in her mind.
In her grief Evangeline began to feel her breathing slow. She was feeling light headed and panicked. Her blood was racing her heart throbbing...The Collins witch started to become dizzy. She felt her heart skip a beat and then she fainted onto the soft cold grass of Widow's Hill allowing her whole body give into her sorrow.
****
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| Quentin's secret Room |
When the witch Claudia awoke, she was asleep on a bed in the West Wing of Collinood. Safe. Sound. She looked around the room. She had never seen this room before when she worked as Cable's governess. It seemed to have been closed off from the main part of the house. The purple drapes were dusty and old. The bed itself looked over 100 years old but there were fresh flowers in a vase on a table. She rushed over to the door, still barefoot and grass stained from the tragedy that occurred on Widow's Hill, and the door was locked. She was sealed inside. Her powers too gone.
As her tear stained face smelled the fresh lilies a large gramophone on a side table began to play music.
She went over to it...the sound of the alluring music drew her closer and closer. She felt it's cool golden surfaces as ran her finger over an engraving on the golden plague attached to the sound box.
It read:
QUENTIN
Then a voice, Bathlem's voice, could be heard in her mind:
"My child, this will be your sanctuary for as long as I can protect you. When the time is right. The door of this locked room will open up your powers will return and you will find your way to freedom, and your destiny. This will be the journey of Barnabas' return to this place. But not until the day comes....in here you will wait."
Claudia fell back in a chair in shock. She looked around her new home. A room far off in a distant lonely part of Collinwood. She was trapped. And unsure of when she would be free. No one would find her.
All she could do was wait. Wait. And Wait some more.
