Beneath the Dark Shadows Part Two
From: N.E. Collins
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 04:20:29

Sam Evans chases away the present and the more recent past with images and memories of twenty-five years ago. Twenty-five years! How could that much time have gone by in such a short time? He was only sixteen years old then and just beginning to do portraits of the locals. He was just a kid working on the docks and in his spare time he was painting on them. Twenty-five years ago. And Betty Hanscomb. His first love. First crush is more like it. Poor Betty never even knew he was alive much less hopelessly heed over heels in love with her! His thoughts raced back to the very first time he had ever laid eyes on the young beauty. It was one day when he was setting up his easel on the docks. He had just bought some new equipment, some better paints and brushes and he was going to capture the most perfect sunset on canvas that had ever been attempted before, when he looked down the pier and spotted Elizabeth Collins with her best friend, the lovely Betty Hanscomb, walking his way.

The two local girls were much the same in appearance. If one didn't know better they would have sworn the two were sisters. Elizabeth was older by two years and Betty's real name was also Elizabeth, but for the sake of their close friendship she had taken the shorter form of Betty to be known as. They were pretty much inseperable and from rather different social standings, or at least their two families were. Betty was a Hanscomb and her father, George was the local handyman of the area. Her mother, Barbara ran a pre-school establishment and was herself a qualified elementary school teacher. But the local folk of Collinsport said she was little more than a glorified baby-sitter. Elizabeth was of the family whose very name was part of the town, the Collins family. They owned the shipping business and the local cannery. They owned and leased most of the buildings in the village, and they enjoyed an immense estate outside of town where they had not one, but two large homes and several smaller houses and some cottages.

The Collins family had been the first settlers to the area who had enough wealth and influence to be able to bring the other settlers into any kind of order. Isaac Collins, along with his brothers Thaddeus and Jeremiah had arrived with their wives and children and various members of their wives families back in the 1670's, and they continued to thrive and multiply as was their wont. Elizabeth's father, Jamison Collins, had tried to raise his daughter to be aloof and to keep her distance from townsfolk, but her mother had always tried to soften his disciplinary blows. If only her mother were still alive to keep her father at bay and to give Elizabeth guidance that she so desperately needed and could only have gotten from a mother. There was her Aunt Nora, Jamison's younger sister and spinster lady. She had never married although at one time she had been engaged.

The story was that the young man had stood her up at the very altar on their wedding day. Any further information was not forthcoming, at least not from her aunt or her father. To them, the subject was closed and just as soon forgotten. Any news Elizabeth was able to glean from the past she was made to rely on the insupportable gossip of the Collinsport locals. They rarely got the story right concerning the family on the hill. Widow's Hill. The spot in the area that was a great contributor to the local superstitious beliefs. Their was a legend that two women had thrown themselves from the peak of Widow's Hill to die among the waves and rocks below, and that someday there would be a third to join them in their hell on earth existence. These woman were cursed and bound to walk the world in which they lived and died.

This was part of the legacy of the Collins family and so also belonged to Elizabeth Collins part and parcel. She had lost her mother at an early age and her Aunt Nora was a poor replacement. She sorrowed often for that loss, but she was simply not allowed to ever grieve openly. Aunt Nora had not cared for her mother and the last time she had caught the girl musing and mooning over the woman's picture she had shattered the frame and so soundly thrashed her verbally that Elizabeth never again was to be seen even looking at a picture of her dear departed mother! Her father, Jamison offered no help with the mad rantings of his spinster sister. He never spoke of his late wife. Not once in all the time that she had died had he ever shed a tear. He had attended her funeral because it was expected of him, but as far as feeling duty bound by any heartfelt emotions he had had none. Aunt Nora, on the other hand had joyously been in attendance! She smiled the entire time that the sad occasion took place and she did little to hide her outward glee.

Aunt Nora did not approve of Elizabeth's relationship with Betty Hanscomb and she took every exception to point this out to her niece. She warned her that the Hanscomb's were nothing but local riff-raff and that it was a scandal that a member of the great Collins family associated with such. George Hanscomb had, on more than one occasion, done work around the Collins properties and it was beyond Nora's comprehension that Elizabeth saw fit to befriend the daughter of a "servant." It was shocking to her way of thinking and not something that would ever have been conducted in her own young life. Jamison did not support his sister in this view nor in many others. They had suffered a long time battle of wills and he wasn't about to give her her due in such as this. He too did not necessarily approve of the friendship, but since his sister admantly disapproved he allowed it.

Nora still continued to berate Elizabeth about Betty. She may not be able to cut their ties, but she could not be prevented from putting in her two cents worth. Her latest tirade about the local girl was that she was too loose and easy with the boys, and that it was only a matter of time before Elizabeth herself would take on this same bad behaviour. "If you run with a pack of wild dogs you must be a wild dog yourself, for no decent beast would be allowed membership in such a sordid tribe." Aunt Nora passed harsh judgement on Betty Hanscomb and Elizabeth defied her aunt in the only way she could; she became Betty Hanscomb best friend in the whole world!

Dark Shadows is a Dan Curtis Production.