Nicole Collins races from the malodorous, grotesque, and fear-shadowed Innsmouth on the sea to the legend-haunted city of Arkham. She is seeking to outrun the twilight – the rising of the sun – as she hopes to stop Narcissa Snow from resurrecting the witch, Keziah Mason. For once she is resurrected, Narcissa will be able to win the Shinning Trapezohedron from the ancient witch – and with it, there is no telling what Narcissa will be able to call through the dimensional gate.
Opening soundtrack: [www.youtube.com]
The small motorboat moves under the old bridge.
Fierce winds from the storm skirting along the eastern seacoast bend the darksome tress violently along the riverbanks. The waters of the Miskatonic are rough as they rock the small boat. Early twilight will soon dawn, thirty-five, forty minutes to sunrise and in the background haunted Arkham still sleeps.
The misty rain’s fine pellets sting her face in the wind and yet Narcissa Snow smiles.
It will not be long now, all the planning, all the careful adherence to the proscription of the ritual, all the murders will culminate on the island and the Witch shall awaken, and she will be granted the treasures. She will be given the gem and at last HE will take all these voices out of her head. HE will finally lay her grandfather – her father – to rest.
He will no longer haunt her.
The island ahead is desolate, long avoided, save by adventurous teenagers, who occasionally took a boat out to the island in the middle of the Miskatonic as part of some dare, or wild thrill-seekers looking to walk an island a Witch once used to practice grotesque spells and enchantments. Winter browned sedge-grass and trees that look more dead than alive.
Against the hard chop of the breakwater crashing against the stony shoreline, Narcissa Snow lets the small boat ride up on the ragged shore. Beside her, trembling, shivering in the wind, the cold, the light rain, an unfortunate student that Narcissa has car-jacked from the Miskatonic campus sits in the boat frightened, not only by the circumstance, but the wild, disheveled appearance of the woman with the dried blood stains on her too short dress.
“Please,” She says, tears running down her cheeks, “Please, let me go. ”
Narcissa steps out of the boat, careful not to let it capsize, “Oh, but my dear there is so much to see. Here take my hand.”
The young woman trembling reaches out a cautious hand and takes Narcisss’a strong one, as she is pulled up out of the small motorboat.
She steps onto the desolated island. She looks at the stunned shrubbery, the gnarled trees bare of leaves and looking so dead in the half-light; in the distance, she can make out the somber silhouettes of toppling tombstones set along the rise of a slight hill, and off to the right, a series of large, white, standing stones.
Narcissa secures the guide rope of the boat to a large, rain slick rock and turns now to look at the young woman huddled against the wind and the drizzle. She can feel her fear- it nourishes her.
The sweet captive, hair lashing about her face as she tries pushing it back all but futilely, asks, “W-what is this place?”
“This? This is a very historical island my dear. Did you know that at one time, here in Arkham they had a witch imprisoned in the Arkham jail – the charge of course being witchcraft.”
“Narcissa,there is little time.” Her grandfather’s voice says as he stands watching a few feet away.
“You must hurry now Narcissa. Time is slipping away.” The young boy adds.
“But you know before her trial she just disappeared. Totally. Even Cotton Mather . . . you do know who Cotton Mather is . . . now don’t you?”
“No!” the young woman says huddling against the stiff wind, the lashing mist.
“Ah. A pity. No one understands history today.”
“I told you she would fail.” The Ipswich prostitute laughs.
“Well, you see, this Witch, Keziah Mason, she knew things . . . this middling old woman — you might even say, a pure stereotypical old crone,” Narcissa begins, trying to talk above the wind, the taunting voices, “A witch in the seventeenth century, mind you, who knew more about dimensions and mathematics and gates at the boundaries of time and space, then Heisenberg, or Einstein, or Minkowski, or Hawking for that matter.”
The wind growing fiercer, as if aware of her intent, lashes Narcisssa’s hair against her face.
“And did you know. I alone know how to summon her?”
The young student stumbles on the uneven ground, “No, I didn’t” trying to cooperate, trying not to antagonize the crazy woman.
Her grandfather begins to pace along the shore, his hands clasped behind his back as he shakes his head, “Are you going to take all night, you crazy b***h, or are you going to get this thing done right?”
Narcissa whirls around to face him, snarling, “When this is over Old Man he will take you out of my head.”
He smiles at her, “Are you so sure of that?”
The girl looks at her, “Who are you taking to?”
Narcissa looks back over her shoulder at her, a sadden expression suddenly on her face, “The man, who for twelve years of my life I called grandfather, until . . . the day I put an ice pick in his chest and discovered that he was really also my father.”
“I want to go!” The young woman begins to cry, “Please. I won’t tell anyone!’
“Tell anyone what?”
“About any of this.”
“Oh, this?” And Narcissa reaches out and grabs her hand and begins to leads her over the uneven ground, toward the bleak graveyard. She looks up into the night sky, the light drizzle, and the gusting wind. “I guess she not going to make the dance?”
“Who? Who are you talking about? Who are you talking to!” The young woman is so confused. The crazy woman seems to be conversing with to so many different people . . .
“Narcissa!” Her grandfather – her father – says not at all amused.
She drags the girl along, her feet slipping on the rain slick rocks, the mud, as she whips her over toward a grave, “Now, here is something you really need to see. I want you to take a look at this/”
“What . . . I don’t see anything.”
“Well, get down on your knees and look closely,” she points at a broken grave marker.
The student scared, crying, kneels . . . “What.”
From out of the mist, from behind a tree, Nikki Collins suddenly steps out, her black coat whipping about her, “Let her be, Narcissa.”
The crying woman looks at her, her eyes pleading for her to intervene.
“Ah, so, you did make it to the dance after all.”
Nikki takes a step forward; her eyes no longer bright blue, but midnight black – her fangs now visible, as she has given herself over to the vampire within her.
Naricssa, the wind whipping about her, the rain beading on her face, rolls her head from side to side, “Just one more, Nikki, there’s just one more to go.”
Eyes narrowing, Nikki looks into her yellow ones, “You will stop this,now.”
Narcissa looks at her for a long moment, and then smiles, “What? Are you going to try that old trick? I’m sorry,that doesn’t work on me.”
And she grabs a handful of the young woman’s hair, pulls the head back and with one quick slice cuts the young woman’s throat.
Nikki, in a blur, moves. . . but it is too late to stop the knife as Narcissa moves nearly as quickly as she.
The horrid gurgling sound fills the night.
The girl twitches and falls into the mud.
”None to go.” Narcissa laughs watching Nikki’s anger rising.
Nikki suddenly is assailed by the scent of hot human blood.
“You B***H!” Nikki snarls her sharp teeth snapping loudly together.
As the blood spews from the victim’s neck, seeping into the dirt and sod, the wind intensifies. Trees bending as if they will snap.
“And what . . . you were going to stop me!” She says and licks the blood off the blade of the knife, “My father taught me well.”
“You always were very good with a knife,” He grandfather/father says with a proud smile.
Her yellow eyes taunting, “What did your father ever teach you? Anything?”
The blood starts to flow, and appears to stream, to snake across the ground up the slight hillock and down now toward an odd arrangement of standing stones.
“Why, why would you do this?”
“To stop these voices in my head!” She says and suddenly lunges with the knife, her hand a blur as she stabs at Nikki. “And because if I give it to HIM he will give me whatever I want!!”
The blood continues it’s unnatural path.
Nikki grabs her wrist and twists, and flips her off balance, and Narcissa tumbles off the slight hill.
Narcissa growls, and her face starting to distort, fangs appearing, her eyes growing bright yellow.
She leaps up at Nikki.
Nikki grabs her and holds her wrists. Narcissa Snow’s nails now having transformed into claws.
Nikki hisses and she grabs the side of Narcissa’s face and turns her head as she opens her mouth wide, and Nikki sinks her fangs deep into the exposed flesh of Narcissa’s throat.
Only it is not human blood!
Nikki hurls her back and away from her as she spits out the foul taste of her.
Up from the muddy ground, Narcissa scrambles to her feet, her fingers wide apart and curled, the nails sharpened claws, she crouches for a moment and then leaps again to drive a knee into Nikki’s abdomen, doubling her up and then driving a elbow to the back of her head.
Nikki stumbles but does not fall. She twirls with superhuman dexterity and whips an arm around even as the gusting wind whips the black woolen overcoat. Now she has to fight not only the woman but also the strong gusts. Nikki’s lips pull back to expose blood stained fangs, the wet crimson on her lips, as in anger she strips the coat off and tosses it into the wild wind. She looks down and see’s that Narcissa’s knife had cut into her forearm — even as she is aware that it was healing.
Narcissa Snow, blood flowing from the wound at her throat, watches Nikki’s every move warily, until she suddenly notices, the flow of blood from the young student making its way to the stones.
She smiles at Nikki, “It is done! Tis the Season of the Witch!”
The blood, now mixed with dirt, reaches the standing stones and starts to coalesce into the form of a human.
Narcissa turns and races over toward the ancient rock formation, only Nikki arrives before her to stand in the slightly broken circle of the irregularly cut stones. Unlike Stonehenge, this gathering of standing stones would seem to have quietly settled into the earth, slowly losing any uniformity, any foundational structure, creating now tilting, odd angles — and yet, this seeming disarray, Nikki instinctively felt, was in fact an intricate arrangement. It was designed around Keziah Mason’s bizarre angles. Nikki felt not only the sinister foreboding of the location, but an emanating power as she watched now as a woman in puritanical garb, complete with what some would consider a stereotypical hat, begins to appear in the bloody mess.
Keziah Mason lifts her arms into the air, feeling the increasing gale force of the wind as she stretches . . . and then looks down at the bloody chaos that is currently her body as it continues taking form: “Oh. This Ritual. hihihihi! A favorite!”
“I have completed it for you.” Narcissa tells her proudly.
Keziah Mason finally forms herself into flesh.
She looks at Narcissa – notes the golden eyes.
There is a rodent-like beast on her shoulder.
Its face appears to be that of a human.
“Narcissa, stop, you don’t know what you are doing!” Nikki admonishes her.
“Y Witch will praise y wise, and should bestow four treasures.” Keziah Mason now addresses the two, as she slowly begins to run a comforting hand along the back of the rodent-like creature on her shoulder, “Which one of ye is y wise? Hmm?”
Narcissa takes a step closer, “I am here to praise your name Keziah Mason. I have done all that that has been required to bring you back, my dear Mason.”
“Ah. Wise. But are y wise enough? ” And she removes a piece of chalk from her dress pocket and begins to very rapidly scratch out an equation on one of the oddly angled standing stones. As she writes, the base of the stone began to emit a violet glow. The small creature on her back leaps off now and scampers along the uneven ground to find a stone and sits watching the equation growing as she continues to write it out:
“Now tell me child, what is the answer.”
Nikki watches the chalk on the stone, “Keziah, I seek none of your treasure.”
“42.” Narcissa says.
“What is 42. Sigma? or ‘T’?”
“T.”
“Stop Narcissa, stop while you can.” Nikki warns her.
Keziah Mason smiles, “Truly a wise one art ye.” The she turns now her attention upon Nikki, “And who is this?”
“I am one who wishes for you to retain all your treasures.” Nikki tells her, “I am come from him whose name you have written in his book, he who gave you the name Nahab, I am come from him who wishes for you to keep that which is his save from this time and space.”
“Oh, ye speak wi’ ol’ Narly eh?’
“Oh she will best you yet you crazy b***h, why would you ever think you could succeed in this endeavor.’ Her grandfather/father says shaking his head.
“It is I who seeks The Darkness, The Chaos. I am Narcissa Snow and my family has kept the convents and swore the alliance, and we have served him well.” Narcissa snarls, “I have fulfilled all that was asked. I have completed the ritual and now the gem is mine . . . as it should have always been. It is my birthright!”
Keziah Mason frowns just a bit, ‘Ye both wants y gem? None want y control o’ y dead souls? Nor y resurrection o’ lost love?’
“I want none of you treasures,” Nikki tells her, “It is desired that you keep the gem in those dimensions within which you have escaped.”
Narcissa Snow stands with her knife drawn, “The 11 are dead . . . the treasures are mine.”
“How wise are ye then?” She looks to Nikki.
“Oh, girl, I knew you would fail,” The voice of her grandfather comes to her from behind the pillar.
“As I said, HE whose book you have signed does not want the gem in this dimension. He wants you to safe guard it.’
“Do not listen to her! She is lying. She has attempted to disrupt the basic structure of our world, she has gone to Providence, she has sought to break the old alliances. Now, I have completed the ritual. . . and so you must do as I ask.”
“Hold ye tongue. All of them.” Keziah Mason says, the rodent-like creature at her ankle snarling at them. She turns now to Nikki. “Now child IF a triangle on the surface of a sphere has, on one corner, the angle of 90 degrees, and on another, an angle of 30 degrees, then what is y angle of y third one?”
Nikki sighs and looks at the witch, remembering the words of Dr. Artemis in that the poem was not quite right, as it would end with the death of the witch . . . and so, is the answer to the question the right answer 90, or is it a trick? Should she answer it wrong?
“Do ye know y answer?”
“60.” Nikki says purposely incorrect.
“Well. I can see ye is not wise, and has no claim to my prize. And she turns now to Narcissa. “And so Child.”
“See, I told you this was my treasure.”
Keziah Mason, still holding her piece of chalk turns to the pillar and starts writing out a new mathematical equation.
“Oh. And please devour the unwise one Brown Jenkins, as it would appear she be too wise for her own good.”
“Perhaps I may have misunderstood your intentions based on part of your poem, I gave you a wrong answer on purpose, the answer you are seeking is of course 90.”
“No she answered wrong . . ..” Narcissa says stamping her foot.
Reaching down to grab the rat-like being with her hand as it is about to leap at Nikki, Keizah Mason smiles, “Calm Jenkins. She was wise in her answer. Wise in her caution too, but thought too much for her own goode.”
She steps over and sits on the edge of an angled stone, “Will one of y please kill y other one now?” She says as she sits petting Brown Jenkins curled up in her lap.
Naricssa, smiles and flicks her knife and in one quick lunge drives the knife at Nikki. Ballet flats quick over the slick muddy earth of the barren ground about the standing white stones, Narcissa slips the knife into Nikki’s side, feeling the steel blade grate upon a rib. Nikki grimaces and her hand clamps down around the wrist holding the knife and she grips it tightly. Narcissa growls. Tries to pull her hand free, but Nikki’s grip is too strong.
With the blade inside Nikki, her wrist held tightly, she’s trapped, as the tall blonde vampire now grips the back of her neck and pulls her forward.
Nikki watches as the yellow eyes fill with rage, even as she parts her lips and lets her fangs become fully exposed as she hisses at the werewolf.
Kzeiah Mason sits calmly watching the struggle for her prize.
Narcissa’s claws try to rake at Nikki’s face, but she deflects the move with a deft elbow.
Nikki’s free hand suddenly grips Narcissa’s throat and squeezing, lifts her up and then dashes her to the muddy ground.
Narcissa tries to twist the knife inside Nikki as she bends down to hold upon the ground.
Nikki grimaces as she feels the blade scrape on the bone of her lower rib, and, holding the struggling wrist of Narcissa, she painfully pulls the knife out of herself. Her eyes narrow, her lips pull back as holds the struggling Narcissa Snow by the throat. In the slipper mud, Narcissa’s shoes fail to find traction, as she tires to kick them off. Nikki now turns Narcissa wrist excruciatingly back, while Narcissa’s snarling sharp teeth gnash at her.
Quickly, Nikki release her grip on her throat and Nikki suddenly stabs the blade into the side of Narcissa’s neck.
Narcissa’s growl becomes a horrible gurgle, not unlike the sickening sound the young student had made only moments ago.
Fingers of her free hand reaching to try and clutch at the knife, blood gushing from the wound to splatter her white mini-dress and the muddy ground, she writhes against Nikki’s hand pressed full upon her chest.
Nikki’s eyes look down into the stricken golden eyes of Narcissa Snow as she takes her hand up from her chest and with one powerful blow, using the heel of her hand, she drives the knife all the way to the black wooden hilt.
“Stupid B***h!” Aldus Snow wails as he watches his daughter trying to breath, trying to grip the knife with futile fingers.
Nikki’s eyes have become narrowed slits, dark and full of menace as gripping the handle of the large carving knife, she twists it.
Narcissa suddenly goes very still, her hands falling limply, as she tries to breath, her yellow eyes glaring at Nikki, who is slowly rising to stand above her.
Nikki places a hand to her side, feeling the dampness of the blood oozing from her wound as she silently looks down to watch Narcissa Snow die.
Keziah Mason looks up at the tall blonde vampire and smiles. Then looks to Narcissa taking one long gasp. “Think of it like this child,” and she stands up from her seat upon one of the white stones and leans down to looks at her, “At least ye shall never hear y voices again.”
Nikki standing over Narcissa sees the blood as all so captivating. She longs to bend down and drink it all — only she is aware of the werewolf taint — the horrible bitterness in the blood.
“Ah.” The Witch says with a knowing nod, “Ye of the subordinate race want to feed. Best y drink well of y that lies yonder,” motioning to the hillock, where beyond lies the young woman Narcissa had murdered earlier, “This one be Loup Garou.”
Nikki lets the wind lash through her hair as she fights now the growing urge to depart, to stalk the night, to find a lovely throat, to drink all night — seeing now all the blood flowing from Narcissa’s wound.
Keziah Mason looks at her, “Well, we can’t have that — now can we.” And she waves a hand and the body of Narcissa Snow, as well as all traces of her blood, vanish into the earth. The witch then looks at Nikki and smiles, “Not now, my dear. Later ye can slake y thirst.”
“So, who wrote the poem for you Keziah?” Nikki asks.
“Why, who do ye think?” Keziah laughs, “I wrote it meself!
“I thought as much.” Nikki says, the wind lashing her hair about her face. She feels the pain in her side, the stitch in it as it begins to heal.
“True, I be not from Innsmouth, but I find simply mentioning y place is eldritch enough.” Keziah Mason smiles malevolently, “Think y not why there be 11 y that must die? Twas the number who testified to seeing me lovely Jenkin.”
“So, do you even have the gem?” Nikki asks, looking at her blood hand and then placing it back against her side, “I mean seeing as how it did not disappear until 1936 . . . or is this all but a ruse for the unwise?”
“Time y space are of no consequence to me Child. Oh, I has the gem. And had she won, I’d be obligated to give it unto her. And me four treasures. But methinks ye are more sensible than that.”
“In Providence I have seen him, HE who came from the gem, and as I said HE wishes for it to stay out of this dimension.”
“I am sure he does, now. Of course, this was not always y case.” Keziah Mason says, “Ol’ Narly sure is finicky in his ways, “and she winks at Nikki, “Ye will see.”
The witch now turns to look to the southeast, “But y had best make ye wish and run child y dawn is almost upon us.”
“I have no wish. I just have a message for you from him, to take it and hide it far way, so it shall not be found.”
Keziah Mason places her hand over her heart, “Message received,” and she smiles kindly, “Y have no loved one y wish to have brought back from y dead?”
“I don’t know if they are dead.”
Kzaih Mason looks at her, “They are not. Now go child!”
“Yes — here comes the sun.”
Keziah Mason takes the chalk and writes a mathematical, dimension bending equation on the pillar, “Ye will find HE really is just a big softy once ye get to knoweth him.” She says to Nikki as she turns away.
“I bid you good morning, madam.”
“Good day to ye, child,” the resurrected Keziah Mason says as she writes the equals symbol and as she finished the letter Delta turns to Nikki, before finishing the equation, “Take care, perhaps one day we shall meet again.
And smiling, like the Cheshire Cat, Keziah Mason fades.
Nikki notices that the equation written upon the white standing stone equation glows red for a moment and the chalk writing slowly fades also, even as she hears a disembodied voice on the wind, “Fair y well child.”
Nikki races to the motorboat and starts the engine, pushing off from the island and heading back toward the shore and Arkham.
Behind her the wind whips at the edges of the clothing of the corpses of the hapless student, Susan, and Narcissa Snow.
The horizon grows brighter still as Nikki watches the shore grow closer and closer, she has to soon master other forms of transportation she thinks as she leaps from the boat as it runs aground. She quickly races up the incline to the dead end cul-de-sac and the Impala parked there.
Samantha stands with the trunk open. “Quickly Miss Nikki! Quickly!’
The sun rises from the horizon and Nikki quickly rolls into the trunk, a bit of light hitting her hand and she gasps at the burn it creates.
Samantha quickly slams the lid down blocking further light.
She turns to look at the desolate island. The boat drifting free now in the choppy Miskatonic. She turns to walk to the front of the car, and finds, as she slips her hand into her pocket for the keys, a piece of paper. Apparently Nikki had slipping it in as she leapt past her, something she had already written long before even going out to that damnable island.
Sam opens it and it reads:
Take me home Samantha. Please, take me home.
Cue Music End of Episode