Quentin's Revenge

Part Two: The Deed

He slept like a contented baby that night. For once nightmares did not plague his sleep. Instead, he dreamt about a life untainted by the presence of Barnabas; a normal life-span with the woman he loved. With Beth. He woke up before dawn and watched the sun rise, knowing that at that precise moment Barnabas was fast asleep in his coffin, or whatever it was he did in there.

Luck was on his side. Roger was off at the canneries, David and Maggie took the train to Bangor, and Carolyn and Liz were preparing to leave for Boston to spend a week with Aunt Kathryn. He met the two in the breakfast room, where Liz was pleading with Carolyn to eat something, anything. He didn't blame Carolyn for not eating; Mrs. Johnson's coffee was dubious, at best, and the sausage looked boiled. Why couldn't she serve something safe, like cold cereal and milk?

"Good morning, Quentin," Liz said as he sat down with a glass of orange juice. She cracked her soft boiled egg carefully with her spoon, then pushed it away when she saw how soft it really was.

"Good morning, Elizabeth," Quentin said in return. He took a sip of orange juice. "Are you going somewhere?" he asked innocently, knowing fully well that she was.

"We're leaving for Boston after breakfast," Liz replied.

"Please, mother," Carolyn said testily. "We can pick something up on the way out of town. I don't know why you insist--"

"I insist on keeping Mrs. Johnson because she has discretion, a quality few people have. The subject is closed." Liz took a last swallow of coffee--an instant regret--and announced their departure.

Being the gentleman he was, he carried the women's luggage out to the car, stowing the suitcases into the trunk of the Bentley. He waved as Liz--who was driving for the first time in eighteen years--slowly maneuvered the car down the driveway. He bet within five minutes Carolyn would be driving.

* * * * *

The tool box was in the basement, just as he expected. Finding it had taken up a good hour of his day. The tool box was covered in cobwebs and shoved behind a pile of boxes containing old copies of Hardy Boys books. David had outgrown them, and no wonder why, Quentin thought. A person can only read some many books about pirate smugglers and hack robbers. The boy had long since figured that more interesting things happened in places like the Old House, deserted west wings, and old cemetaries.

The basement was a curious place to Quentin. Willie Loomis once told him a story about how Liz spent twenty years secluded in Collinwood because she thought she had killed her husband, then buried the body in a trunk in a basement room. How he laughed when Willie told him that, when they dug up the trunk, Paul Stoddard's body wasn't there! Twenty years of forced seclusion for nothing. He peeked into the room where the "body" had lain. The tiles on the floor were still up, a spade leaned against the wall, and a trunk stood on its side, the lid gaping.

He wiped the cobwebs off the toolbox and opened it. The hinges had rusted abysmally, which didn't surprise him. He didn't know how the fix-it work was done, since Loomis had found respectability in a girl named Roxanne and home improvement to Roger was buying a nice antique for the drawing room. Judging by the state of the tools, home repairs had not been on the agenda of any Collins in a long, long time. Quentin picked a mallet out, and searched for an ax. He found a small one of the type firemen used to cut down doors. It was easily portable, he thought with glee, and would work perfectly.

The next part was to sneak out of the house. The closest exit to the glade was through the kitchen, where Mrs. Johnson would be. He preferred that exit, as most of the others could be seen from the Old House. The tree cover had, unfortunately been quite sparse lately. Roger had been trying to figure out ways to bring in new revenue and selling lumber was his best idea. Liz kept a sharp rein on that. Quentin figured that the easiest way to bring revenue in was if Roger actually did something while he was at the office, instead of just sitting there and hitting on the receptionist.

The kitchen it was. Mrs. Johnson was at the sink and washing dishes. Quentin could hear faint mumbling and figured it was about the leftover food that she slaved over a hot stove to make. He nonchalantly walked through the kitchen and to the back door, the mallet and ax casually hanging out of his hand.

"And just where do you think you're going with that?" she asked him before he could open the door.

He opened the door. "I told Barnabas that I would fix some things down at the Old House for him."

She suspiciously narrowed her eyes at him. "It would be nice if someone would figure to do the handy-man's work around this house. What with my having to cook and clean, Lord knows--"

Quentin deftly slipped out the door and closed it behind him. He made a very valiant effort not to sprint across the back yard to the glade. That woman was too much, he thought. Made my sister Judith look docile and not the termagant she really was.

He walked through the trees for at least half an hour, looking for the perfect holly tree from which to make his stake. It had to be old enough to have a stout, woody trunk. He found a few dead trees, but passed on those. Would that even hurt Barnabas, passing a stake made from a dead tree through the chest of one of the living dead?

He finally found the perfect tree: old enough to have a stout, woody trunk as well as being straight enough to require little work to turn it into a stake. This would be the hardest part of his task. Quentin hardly thought of himself as handy and had never hit a nail with a hammer in his life. Over the past seventy years he found himself in quite a few scrapes, but none that required he rehang a door on hinges or build a piece of Arts and Crafts furniture. Most solutions required a quick wit or a quick sprint.

Quentin laid the mallet down on the ground and hefted the ax up. The tree took little effort to bring down. He carefully cut off all the branches and laid them to the side. He chipped the bark off and whittled the trunk down to a manageable size before he sharpened the end. When he finished, a smile spread slowly over his face. Perfect. Sharp enough to take little effort of going through. Quick and painless–well, painless for him. Now for the final step of his plan.

* * * * *

During his friendly periods with Barnabas, when he was Grant Douglas during the Leviathan period, he had spent some time guarding the vampire with Julia. Barnabas’ coffin was located on sawhorses in the basement of the Old House, which, in theory, should be a safe place, was actually riddled with tunnels leading out all over the property. This was useful during the American Revolution when Joshua Collins smuggled weapons for the colonists, but to protect a vampire with many enemies, the basement was not the safest place to be. Why, anyone could sneak in! And that was exactly what Quentin was hoping to do. The shortest way would be the front door, but Julia was usually in the drawing room, holding her Frankie Fan Club meetings or reading a romance novel.

Walking down to the beach and finding the tunnel took him an hour out of his way without alerting Julia. Nobody ever went down to this beach. The locals preferred the Collinsport Public Beach, with its pristine beaches of imported sand. In fact, no one ever trespassed on Collins’ land, not because they feared swift retribution at the hands of the law, but because they feared never finding their way off the property, or finding their way off of it via Widow’s Peak, with their bodies never being found. So it was in seclusion that Quentin picked his way over rocks and boulders to the smuggler’s cave. He moved aside some dead branches and made his wa inside. He used a flashlight gotten from the utility room to find his way around the dank tunnels.

Eventually he came closer to the end, to the Old House basement. Another half hour elapsed before he found a switch to open the secret panel. He found himself in a stone room, outfitted only with a cot, worn mattress, and shoddy wool blanket. A toy doll lay on the floor. The only entrance to the room, apart from the one by which he entered, was a heavy metal door with a small, barred window at the top. Despite the air of unuse around the room, Quentin could tell that it had been used in more recent history, the past few years in fact. On a small table sat a metal plate with the remains of chicken bone, the food long gone thanks to roaches and rats.

Quentin slowly eased the door open. It was well-oiled, too, he noticed. The hinges made not a noise as he pushed it all the way open. He could not help but shiver as a cool breeze pushed past his shoulder. Knowing Collinwood and especially the Old House as he did, he felt it was probably more than a breeze pushing past, probably more like a long-trapped spirit, but he did leave the passageway door open. He looked back at the room before leaving, looked back towards the secret door, and it was closed.

He shook his head, trying to clear it, to remind himself of his mission. He pushed close the prison door, being careful not to slam it, lest it make Julia aware of his presence.

Quentin stepped out of the shadows and made his way to the coffin. It sat on the sawhorses as he remembered, the lid of the coffin shiny mahogany and delicate crenelations. Not a speck of dust laid on the top. He made quiet steps over to it, his mission so near completion he dare not jinx it. He had made it this far, but so much could still thwart him, Julia’s awareness, Angelique’s resistance...

The lid opened slowly and he grinned slowly. He pushed it back on its hinges and prepared to lift the stake and hammer it home when what he saw made him stop in mid-air.

A stake had already been driven through Barnabas’ heart, and the vampires face had frozen into a grim visage of death.... for a second time. Blood had caked and dried onto the front of the suit, and the stake had been driven so far in that Quentin could barely see the top of it. Whoever had done this had needed great strength or emotion to push in the stake.

He turned around quickly, dropping his own stake and mallet on the floor. He went towards the stairs to see to Julia–who could have done this without her knowing? The deed had been committed long before he arrived, and surely Julia would have been down here by now, wailing the fate of Barnabas. Only minutes ago he had been the one thinking of killing Barnabas, and the irony of his disgust was not lost on him. Maybe I am not feeling disgust, he thought, but regret that I had planned too late and too carefully.

The scene that greeted him on the stairs horrified him even more than what happened to Barnabas. Julia lay at the bottom of the stairs, her body broken and battered by the fall. She did not suffer long, he noticed, though, by the bullet aimed at her heart. She did not feel the pain of her fall, of her broken neck, because she had been dead already. He stood frozen in place, knowing that he would have to leave, to be somewhere else as an alibi so he could claim ignorance of the debacle.

“Hello, Quentin,” a throaty voice said behind him. He turned around swiftly, only to hear the cocking of a gun.

A gun aimed right at him.

“Maggie?” he asked, very confused. “I thought you were in Bangor with David.”

She smiled a grin that only a few minutes before he had worn. “I dare say you did. That was the plan after all.” She stepped out of the darkness and into the candlelight. “We had to move more quickly, though, after your conversation with Julia the other night.”

“We?” Quentin asked. “And how did you know about the conversation?” He played back in his head what he had said to Julia but could not think what had divulged his plan.

“Yes, Roger and I,” Maggie said. She smiled coyly at his look of shock. “Upset, Quentin, that Roger passed where you had failed? Your legendary charm has failed you, it seems. I don’t think it will happen again, though.”

Their conversation was interesting, though Quentin was still worried about the gun trained on him. If the bullet was a normal kind of bullet, the portrait would take the damage, leaving him fine. Maggie had, however, planned quite thoroughly, more so than he had done, and he doubted the bullet was anything but silver. That was a tangent of which he was unsure.

“Perhaps you don’t know the entire story, Quentin,” Maggie continued. “As you came in, I’m sure you noticed the tiny prison room. I was confined there for a period of weeks by our dear, departed friend, in an effort to make me into his beloved Josette.” She sneered as she said the name. “I didn’t take, fortunately, but only after I escaped and was sent to Wyndcliffe.” She gestured to Julia. “She tried to hide what had happened to me, in an effort to further her studies in the paranormal. She knew I had been bitten by a vampire, and she knew that I could lead her back to him.”

Maggie sobered. “I did feel sorry for her, in a way. So devoted to he who was devoted to a silly young thing that would rather kill herself than wed herself to a vampire.”

Quentin trembled. Sweet, silly young Maggie was no longer silly or sweet. She had been through much in her young life, being abducted by Barnabas, being locked up in an asylum, losing her father, and then losing her fiancé. He could barely begrudge her her revenge. In fact, she was more entitled to it than he was, considering the debauched, hedonistic lifestyle he had led.

“Well,” he said, with a forced laugh. “That ends that. We both got what we wanted, and we can go back to living our lives.” He made to leave, once again by the secret passageway, but she stopped him.

“Not so fast, Quentin,” she said. “We’re not finished with you.”

That troublesome we had popped up again. Was someone else down here with them? The answer was given to him moments later.

“David, Roger, you can come out now,” Maggie said.

Quentin watched in growing horror as David and Roger came out, carrying what used to be his portrait. Roger carried the remnants of the frame while David carried the shreds of the portrait. A sinking feeling grew in the pit of his stomach as he noticed how deeply entrenched their feelings must be.

“This is for holding me hostage as a ghost,” David said petulantly, as he threw the portrait shreds on the ground. Roger threw the frame down as well, then picked a candle from the candleabra, lighting a corner of canvas into flames.

Quentin’s heart sunk even lower as he watched the portrait turn to ashes on the stone floor. He appealed to their better natures one more time.

“David, really, I don’t even remember being a ghost! Barnabas changed things to save you and attempted to help me when he realized my problem. Anything that happened before he changed time can’t be held against me,” he said.

“Want to bet?” David asked. Roger placed his hand on his son’s shoulder. The damned gun was still trained on Quentin.

“My son may be a pain in the ass, Quentin, but he’s right,” Roger said. “He does what he does due to a lack of attention, not because he’s a malevolent supernatural being.”

This was not good, this was not good, Quentin repeated to himself. His plans had gone terribly wrong–this is what he deserved for trying to become sober! Had he just stayed drunk, he wouldn’t have had the motivation to go through with his plans. So much for forward thinking, he thought glumly.

“All right, so you’re going to shoot me,” he said. “Then what?”

“Do you think we’re that stupid, Quentin?” Maggie asked. “You’re trying to stall us.” The gun was remarkably level, right on aim with his heart. He saw his incredibly long life flash before his eyes, which was just as well, because it distracted him from Maggie’s pulling the trigger and his hitting the stone floor after the bullet went into his heart.

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