Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes has been harboring a fugitive in his apartment for some time. The fugitive, known only as Adam, is a very tall, extremely strong man whose vocabulary was limited to a handful of words when he met Stokes. He has been learning at a prodigious rate, and can now carry on conversations. Stokes gives Adam a break from reading the dictionary and asks him to recount his earliest memory.
Adam speaks once more in isolated monosyllables as he tells the story of waking up on a table and seeing old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. Barnabas’ friend, psychiatrist/ blood specialist Julia Hoffman, then jabbed him with a needle. After a car ride, he found himself chained to a wall in a small room where Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis was bad to him. Adam broke the chain and attacked Willie, then Barnabas beat him. Stokes is trying to decide what to make of this story when a knock comes at the door. He sends Adam to read the dictionary quietly in the back bedroom while he deals with his visitors.
They are well-meaning governess Vicki Winters and her boyfriend, an unpleasant man named Peter. Vicki wants Stokes to hypnotize Peter in hopes of breaking through the total amnesia that covers all of his life up to the last few months. Stokes sends Vicki away, and puts Peter under.
Peter tells him that a mad scientist named Lang compelled him to assist in the construction of a Frankenstein’s monster, and that Barnabas and Julia were in on the project. Stokes puts two and two together. He brings Adam into the room, and Peter identifies him as Lang’s creation. Still under hypnosis, Peter refuses to regress any further into his past, fearing that he, too, might be one of Lang’s products.
Stokes calls on Vicki at the great house of Collinwood. Vicki says that it makes no difference to her what Peter’s background is; Stokes tells her that she is lying, because if that were the case she would not have taken Peter to him to be hypnotized. When Dark Shadows began, Vicki represented the audience’s point of view; since then, she has tended to be simply a Good Person. It is extremely rare to hear any suggestion that she might have a selfish motive, and even rarer for her to be credibly accused of deception. For Vicki fans, it is intriguing to think that the show might allow her to be a complex character who has secrets and behaves unpredictably.
Stokes meets the suave Nicholas Blair, whom Vicki introduces as the brother of Cassandra Collins. Stokes knows that Cassandra is a wicked witch, and he recognizes Nicholas as a man he saw months ago in an antique shop handling a curio associated with Cassandra. Nicholas denies that he was that man, saying that he is new to the area and there are many people who look like him. Nicholas is such a distinctive looking man that he must know that Stokes will know that he is lying, but it does put a stop to the conversation.
Stokes tells Vicki that she must leave Collinwood at once. He explains that if she does not, she “will have the dream,” that “Barnabas Collins will be your beckoner,” and that this means Barnabas will die. She protests that she cannot have “the dream,” because Sam Evans died before he could tell it to her. He insists that Nicholas and Cassandra will find a way to make her have it. This will be total gibberish to anyone watching for the first time. Regular viewers will know what it means, but most of them will wish they didn’t, since it refers to a slow-moving, heavily repetitious plot that they had hoped the show had decided to abandon.
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