Episode 814: The hand knows what it must do

One night in 1797, nine Rroma men trapped the sorcerer Count Petofi in the forest of Ojden and cut off his right hand. With it, the count lost most of his magical powers. Sometime after, Petofi learned that he could live for exactly one hundred years without his hand. If he was reunited with it in that time, he would become immortal; if he was not, he would die.

Now, it is 1897, and the hundred years are almost up. Petofi has vacated his body and has for some weeks been operating in the person of twelve year old Jamison Collins. He has regained the hand, but as Petofi is dying, so is Jamison. Jamison/ Petofi collapses in the woods carrying the hand back to the place where his servant Aristide is waiting with Petofi’s own body. Jamison/ Petofi passes out shortly after Jamison’s uncle, the rakish Quentin Collins, catches up to him. Quentin carries Jamison/ Petofi and the hand to the caretaker’s cottage on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood, where he confers with his distant cousin, Barnabas Collins the vampire.

Quentin and Barnabas decide that if Petofi dies, Jamison will die as well. Therefore they have no choice but to take the hand to Aristide. Barnabas does get Aristide to promise that once Petofi has the hand, he will use his powers to cure Quentin’s werewolf curse, but no one seems to regard Aristide’s word as valuable. Barnabas makes a menacing move towards Aristide; Aristide wards him off with a cross. Aristide puts the hand on Petofi’s chest, says some magic words, and waits a little over an hour. During this time, he needles Barnabas by offering him tea, which he must know is not part of a vampire’s diet. Then Petofi comes out of his room, laughing his evil laugh and showing off his reattached hand.

In #767, Jamison had a dream in which Quentin told him that his doom was sealed when the one person he truly loved turned against him. It was already clear at that point that this person was Jamison, but today Quentin tells Jamison in so many words that he is the only person he ever really loved. So we can take this as an announcement that the climactic crisis of the part of Dark Shadows set in 1897 is approaching.