Barnabas Collins, Time Lord

Disclaimer: I don't own any of this. Dan Curtis Productions owns Dark Shadows, and the BBC owns Doctor Who. I make no money.

Author's note: This occurred to me the first time the Doctor went undercover. The Dark Shadows characters are based upon the original series. In the original, low-budget Doctor Who, during the Tom Baker years, the arc State of Decay was a vampire story.

What? You never wondered why all that stuff happened to the Collins family?

Every once in a while, the Collinses had the urge to clean out the unused areas of their large, rambling mansion. In winter, when storms lashed the Maine coast, restless people rummaged through rooms stacked and packed with old furniture, bric-a-brac, papers, and the occasional centuries-old skeleton.

Young David had finally made a friend his own age, and so was out of the house.

Dr. Julia Hoffman and Barnabas Collins had driven through the increasing snow to pay a short visit.

"There they go, again," she said, as the sounds of clattering and banging reached her ears. She hung up her coat.

"I heard them while we were in the drive," Barnabas said. "Perhaps we should go upstairs and make certain they don't get into trouble."

"Someone will get into trouble. I don't think we've ever enjoyed more than a month without - incidents."

He chuckled agreement, and started up the stairs.

They found Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, her daughter Caroline, and Roger Collins in an upstairs room on the far end of the east wing. All three were covered with dust, and gathered around an old chest.

Barnabas recognized it. "That belonged to my mother," he whispered, sorrow and love in his tone.

Julia squeezed his hand.

"Barnabas!" Roger called. "I think we found something that belonged to your namesake."

"Let's see it." He knelt, remembering all the times he'd picked the lock as a boy. No-one would ever think to look in Mother's chest for his things, and he'd concealed many a little treasure inside. I'm certain she knew. How could she not?

Three hands offered bobby pins. Smiling, he said, "This lock is three hundred years old. I need something more substantial."

A drawer screeched open. "I found some keys." Roger offered a jangling ring.

"Thank you." He recognized the correct key, but made a show of testing the others, first.

The mechanism turned part-way, then stuck. He shoved the heel of his hand against the edge of the top of the chest, and applied the right amount of his considerable vampiric strength. "There."

Time had stolen the remembered smells of the chest's contents, leaving dust and ancient mildew.

"May I?" Julia asked, seeing his pain.

"Yes, yes." He stood and backed away, swallowing tears.

Julia removed a blanket and laid it aside. From the blanket below, she took a crumbling sachet. She imagined that long-dead woman putting away unneeded blankets, smoothing the cloth, filling the little bag and putting it in place before adding that last blanket, perhaps aided by little Sarah. Angelique, you were such a bitch.

A few more blankets, and then her fingers touched something rectangular. A box, covered with peculiar symbols. "What's this?" She held it up to show the others.

Roger, Elizabeth, and Caroline studied it intently. Barnabas's eyes skidded off of it.

"It's beautiful," Caroline said. "Maybe it's a music box."

Julia stood, box in hand. "It probably doesn't work."

"It never worked," Barnabas muttered, his gaze still skittering away.

"What did you say?" Elizabeth asked.

"Oh, just agreeing with Julia."

We can't open this, Julia thought. Look at the way Barnabas is acting. We'll open it and something horrible will happen. Oh, Lord, not again. Can't we be left alone?

Before she knew it, Caroline had the box and opened it.

White light blazed and tendrils coiled out of the box, wrapping around Barnabas. He gasped, eyes going wide and panic-stricken, staggered.

With anomalous speed, Roger dashed the box from Caroline's hand and shoved Barnabas in the other direction, to no avail.

The light-tendrils entered the vampire's body at every possible point. His skin glowed from the inside, then exploded in streamers of blue-white light. He screamed, a horrible sound of surprise and realization, then collapsed, still blazing.

Oh no. No. No, this can't happen. I almost have it. I almost have the cure, the one they cannot undo. No. They can't have him!

"Julia, no!" Roger grabbed her.

"Let go!" She shook free.

"It's stopped," Elizabeth said.

That horrid white blaze had gone, but his face and hands blurred and shifted as if being molded into new shapes. He gasped, strange words and sounds further mangled by his ever-changing mouth.

Julia dropped to her knees, her mind racing. What was this? What transformation, what hell, was visited on her beloved now? What could she do?

The shifting features steadied, formed, re-formed into the lines and planes she knew so well, yet with subtle differences. Younger-looking, with longer hair. A healthy skin tone.

His eyes opened. Not the tortured, burdened eyes she knew, but alive and blazing with terrifying knowledge. "Stethoscope," he said, hand diving into the pocket where she usually kept hers.

He fitted the earpieces and held it first against one side of his chest, then the other. Annoyed, he opened his coat and tried again. A manic, delirious grin crossed his face. He murmured something, then fell backwards, unconscious.

"What the devil is going on?" Roger demanded.

"I don't know!" she snapped.

"We should take him downstairs," Elizabeth said.

No, we can't. They'll find out what he is. Or would they? She took the stethoscope, applied it to his chest as he had. "He has two hearts!"

Roger prepared to sputter, but his sister shushed him. "Julia?"

She checked, to make certain there was no mistake. "Two hearts. Two separate heartbeats. But that's impossible." Every time he had been human, there had been only one heartbeat.

"Not again," Roger moaned.

"Caroline, call Willie. We can't leave Barnabas on the floor, however many hearts he has." Elizabeth knelt on the other side of Barnabas from Julia. "I have to agree with Roger." She stroked the new hair. "Poor man. It's as if he has a bull's-eye painted on him."

"He looks the same, yet different. As if he were ten years younger." Than his apparent age. Julia felt his forehead. No evident fever. The two heartbeats had been strong.

"That will be hard to explain to people."

Willie rushed into the room. Mrs. Johnson had decided that the walk-in freezer needed cleaning, and been using him for the grunt work. He was at once relieved at getting away from her, and worried about his friend and master. "Caroline told me something had happened - Holy sh – cow!"

"I want to take him downstairs," Julia said.

"Sure." He hoisted Barnabas. "Show me which room."

After they laid him on the bed of a guest room, Julia sent Willie for what he'd dubbed her 'lab in a box.' For once, she would find out what had happened before things got worse.

Wind howled suddenly, rattling shutters and windows. Dismayed, Willie returned. "I could barely see out the door. I'm sorry."

"It isn't your fault."

"Why does this happen to him, to us?"

She knew what he meant. "I wish I knew. Then we could stop all this."

"The time vortex."

They jumped.

Barnabas sat up, the strange light still dancing in his eyes. "That's why I'm here." He was off the bed in an eyeblink. "In this place, and this place alone on Earth, an interdimensional rift and temporal vortex intersect." As he spoke, he headed out the door.

"I'm not a physicist," Julia said, following, "but that doesn't sound possible." He's returning to that room.

"It should not be possible. Either alone can remain undetected and unsuspected for millennia. This place should have been destroyed almost as soon as they intersected."

A mirror stopped him. He examined his face in wonder. "It worked. I didn't think that it would." He lifted his upper lip and poked at his canines.

"What worked?"

"The regeneration."

"Barnabas, we don't understand this," Willie said. "What are you talking about?

"Yes, what are you talking about?" Roger demanded, standing in the middle of the hallway.

"Get out of the way," Barnabas ordered.

Roger obeyed.

At the turn, Elizabeth made an immovable obstacle.

"I'm a Time Lord. I was sent here in - long ago - to study and monitor the only comparatively stable intersection of a temporal rift and interdimensional rift on this planet. My time-ship gave me an identity as a Collins. No-one knew otherwise. I did not know who or what I was until Caroline opened that box."

"That box was in a chest that had been locked since at least the early 1800s," Elizabeth said. "Did you go back in time to hide it?" Here they went, again.

Julia winced. There was no way they could lie their way around this. That box had held the key to Barnabas's real name and life. He would not have been foolish enough to put it someplace inaccessible. He would have put it somewhere he could get hold of it.

"No. I arrived in the late 1790s. My time-ship was to send a signal that would prompt me to open that box. Until then, I would simply ignore it."

No, oh, no. He was going to tell them. "Barnabas, don't."

He turned, and she recoiled. His eyes were utterly alien. "Don't tell me what to do.

"I wrought my cover too well. I became enamored of a young woman named Josette Dupree. That wasn't enough for me. I also seduced her servant, Angelique Bouchard, then cast her aside." He smiled bitterly, sadly. "She did not take it well. She killed my sister and cursed me to become a vampire.

"I was a diligent beast of the night. Eventually, they tracked me down and locked me in a coffin in the family crypt at Eagle Hill."

Willie winced. "I'm to blame for him getting out. Mrs. Stoddard, you remember what I was like, when Jason brought me here. I'd heard stories of jewels buried in the crypt, and I went there to rob the place. While I was forcing the crypt, I found Barnabas's coffin, chained up. I opened it."

The alien light dimmed in Barnabas's eyes, overlaid by the tortured guilt. "The long sleep had only made me angrier and more savage. I was determined to eliminate this family from the face of the Earth."

For once, Roger could not even sputter. Horror and revulsion had silenced him.

"I saw Maggie Evans, and she seemed the image of my lost Josette. I did unforgiveable things to her to make her into Josette. The ghost of my little sister - the girl who thought she was my little sister - Sarah, helped her escape me. When Joe Haskell found her, I tracked her to Windcliff."

Elizabeth and Caroline looked at Julia.

"I was evil. You would not think it now, but I soon had Doctor Hoffman under my control. Doctor Woodard was already suspicious, so I dared not bite her, yet she was as much my slave as Willie had been. I imposed my will upon her and used her loneliness and isolation against her." He turned a strange expression on Julia. "If you had to meet one of us, it should have been that lunatic who calls himself the Doctor. You would not have been any safer, but you would have had more fun."

A lie, yet with enough truth in it to be plausible.

"Willie and Julia still had some fight in them, in their own ways. There were times when Maggie almost got away because of Willie's efforts. Julia conceived another way."

"We've seen you during the day," Caroline said.

"That was Julia's rebellion. She found an antidote for my vampirism. The first time she used it, not only was I cured, but Maggie forgot what had happened to her." He fixed Willie with his gaze. "So did you."

"I've been remembering, in dreams. Just the last couple of days. I wasn't sure if they were real or not, until you started talking."

Real pain creased Barnabas's face. "Then Maggie might remember."

Elizabeth had been thinking. "Your machine was supposed to send you a signal. Did you ever receive it?"

"As a vampire? I was dead. It would have sent the signal, but I could not have received it. It's been asleep for all these decades."

Julia's brain resumed working. "You said, 'regeneration.' What is that? Some way to heal injuries?"

"We don't age the same way you humans do, although it may seem that way. A Time Lord is born, and can live 1000 years between regenerations, if careful. He or she may age, but at the point where a member of any other species would die, is capable of regenerating.

"When you opened that box, my former identity filled me. I remembered everything about myself as my body tried to change back. My human form was, by most measures, dead, which triggered my regeneration.

"Some Time Lords like to leave their new faces and bodies to chance. Others of us are able to control the forms we take. Early in a given cycle, those who have trained for it can even 'try out' various faces and bodies before things settle down. In the split second I had, I determined that my new face should be as much like my old one as possible. You were frightened enough without dealing with an entirely new face and body."

"You said Julia had cured you," Elizabeth said. "It didn't last."

"Things always happened." A considerable understatement. "I don't think you could ever succeed completely, Julia. My condition was not entirely caused by the make-up of my blood. I had no reflection, sunlight harmed me, crucifixes repelled me, and I could turn into a bat. There was, for lack of a better term, a supernatural component to my curse."

"Then you could still revert," Willie said.

"Maybe not. That curse was put on Barnabas Collins, a human," Elizabeth said. "You are not a human."

"Not anymore. I must contact the Council of Time Lords, and transmit the accumulated data. With everything that has happened, there should be a wealth of information for them to analyze." He looked Elizabeth in the eye. "Besides that, I'm certain that you want to see the back of me."

"Amen," Roger muttered.

Elizabeth stood aside.

Barnabas strode into the abandoned room and through another door. He stopped in front of an ancient wardrobe, whose doors had warped open over time. Without a word, he pulled them fully open and reached inside. Julia could not see what he did, but the wardrobe blurred and re-formed as a smooth, rectangular machine of an unusual color, perhaps five feet wide and eight tall.

He stretched out his hand again, his ring swirling with unnamable colors, froze in place. Then he stepped back. A low chuckle became a laugh. Within seconds, he was laughing hard enough to double over while holding his ribs.

"What is it?" Julia asked.

No reply. Not that he could reply.

"What's so damned funny?" Roger wondered.

"Not 'funny.' That's not humor." Elizabeth looked at Julia. "You never suspected he was - well, other than what you knew?"

"No. But then, we were always so busy with one crisis or another that we never had to time to do more than run as fast we could to keep up."

"Oh, the irony!" Barnabas whooped, clapping his hands once and whirling to face them. "This is rich. It is - your language does not have the words to do it justice."

"What?" She braced herself.

"A vampire. I am descended from Rassilon on both sides, and I was a vampire!"

"Who was Rassilon?"

"The greatest Time Lord who ever lived. He tamed a black hole to power our civilization, and led a fleet to combat a race of vampires poised to devour entire planets. He eradicated the lot of them." He leaned his back against his time-ship. His eyes were alien again, dancing with that strange light. "They will never believe me."

He's going home. He's leaving us. Leaving me. Julia's single heart broke. What did she expect? He wasn't a human. He was a Time Lord. His people traveled through time and space, and they didn't have to mess with I Ching wands to do the one, and they didn't need loud, noisy rockets for the other. What could she offer him? He might even have a wife and children.

Without a word, he turned away and pressed his ring against the side of the time-ship. Double-doors swung inwards, revealing an interior that looked too large for the outside dimensions, and he stepped through. The doors shut behind him.

"Did that thing look much larger on the inside than the outside?" Caroline asked.

"It certainly did," her mother agreed.

A weird, grating, surging sound filled the air, and the time-ship disappeared.

Julia glanced between Roger and Elizabeth. None of the creatures that harassed the family ever bothered Roger. They always homed on Elizabeth. Don't be ridiculous. Surely the Time Lords would have discovered Barnabas's time-ship if they had come here again.

She caught Willie's eye. He'd had the same thought.

I think I'd better go and pack. Despite Barnabas's lie, they'll no longer see me as a friend and companion.

The time-ship reappeared, its sound much louder, almost wailing.

Julia went to the doors. "Barnabas? Are you all right? What happened?" She knocked.

One leaf opened. She peered inside.

A six-sided console dominated the center. The internal walls were covered with shallow, circular recesses. Barnabas sat on the floor against one wall, his knees drawn up and his head in his arms.

He lifted his head. On his face was such an expression of loss and sorrow that she wanted to rush in and take him into her arms. "They're gone, Julia."

"Who?"

"The Time Lords. Gallifrey. It's as if they never existed."

Would it never stop? She went to him, crouched, and took his hands in hers.

"The entire sector was empty. Not even debris. There were some readings that I couldn't interpret, but no other clues to what had happened." His hands tightened on hers. "I came back because I couldn't think of anywhere else to go. I could not stay out there."

She looked around. Every inch of this place would remind him of the home he had lost. But, did he have a home here?

"You can stay here," Elizabeth said. "You can stay here until you decide what you want to do." She also looked around.

"After what I told you about myself?"

"You are not that monster, anymore. You've defended and helped us since then." She cast a glance at the door. "Don't mind Roger. I'll keep him in line."

Barnabas pushed himself to his feet. "Thank you, Elizabeth."

She cleared the path so that he wouldn't be tormented by pitying looks or Roger's brand of arrogance. Julia walked beside him, arm in arm.

There was no going to the old house. The storm blackened the sky so that only the clocks told that it was early morning. Most of the Collinses went to bed. Julia and Barnabas sat in the sitting room, by the fire.

"I no longer have vampire senses," Barnabas said, "but I can feel Willie outside the doors."

"I thought it was my imagination. He's so devoted to you." Another irony: if he hadn't tried to rob the family crypt, he would never have met Barnabas, and would now probably be dead or in prison. Meeting Barnabas had improved his life.

"Come in, Willie," Barnabas called.

"We all heard what you said. We were all listening." He looked apologetic. "Anyway, I been thinking. Don't get mad or anything, but I thought maybe there were other Time Lords still around. I mean, if you were here, with your memory gone, maybe there are others. You could find them. It wouldn't be much, but maybe you could figure out what happened, and do something about it. Time travel." He shuffled. "It was just a thought."

What was the difference between what Willie had suggested and what she and Barnabas had already done? They'd changed history at least twice, so far, to save the 20th-Century family.

She could not read his expression. This Barnabas was an alien being.

Wait, hadn't he mentioned another Time Lord? Someone called the Doctor? Could this 'Doctor' be running loose in the universe somewhere or somewhen?

Her stomach grumbled. "I'm going to get breakfast. Can I bring you anything?"

"No, thank you. I just want to think for a while."

Translation: Leave me alone until I want to talk to you. She heard it under his tone.

That evening, Elizabeth, Roger, and Caroline were awake and at lunch/breakfast. Mrs. Johnson, unaware of the reason for the peculiar change in the family's dynamics, scowled around the kitchen in her confusion.

Julia walked into the dining area, hesitated, turned to leave.

"Don't go," Elizabeth said. "Where's Barnabas?"

"He was in the sitting room."

Willie loped in. "He wants us at his - you know."

Looking curiously at each other, they went up to the time-ship.

He stood in the doorway of his craft. The manic, alien glint had returned to his eyes. "Willie suggested that I find any other Time Lords who might be undercover. The Doctor was always insistent that we leave Gallifrey more often. We always had excuses for not doing so."

Roger harrumphed, withered under Elizabeth's glare.

Barnabas tossed a device to Elizabeth. "If you need me, use this. It will alert me, wherever and whenever I am.

"I should at least make the effort to find those of my people who may be out there. And there is an entire universe, all of time and space, to explore."

Willie took a quick step back. Roger took two.

Barnabas smiled and held out a hand. A number of Terrans would have recognized that smile and gesture from another homeless Time Lord. "You won't be any safer, Julia, but you'll have more fun. Are you coming?"

As the sound of the time-ship faded in the great house at Collinwood, down in Collinsport, Maggie Evans sat up in bed. Her nightmare had shredded in a scream of frustrated, diabolical, rage.

In her single, always-human heart, she knew what had happened. She smiled.