The narrative voiceover that opened #202 told us that a new addition to the cast of characters, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis, was destined to “awaken and unleash a force that will affect the lives of everyone.” In #209, the voiceover identified this “force” as “the darkest and strangest secret of them all.”
In his first five appearances, Willie was played by Mississippian James Hall. In #205, Hall’s Willie was escorted to a portrait we had seen for the first time under the previous day’s closing credits. Strange and troubled boy David Collins identified its subject to Willie as Barnabas Collins, a name we had not heard before. Soon Willie started to hear a heartbeat coming from the portrait, and it led him to a mausoleum in a rarely visited part of the old cemetery north of town. In #210, Willie, now played by John Karlen, inadvertently opened a secret panel in that mausoleum and found a chained coffin in the secret chamber behind it. He opened that coffin, hoping to find the jewels that once belonged to Barnabas. In fact, he found Barnabas himself, a vampire who would enslave him.
In the fall of 1970, the feature film House of Dark Shadows was playing in theaters around the USA. In that movie, Karlen again plays Willie. That version of the character is led to the mausoleum not by a heartbeat he hears through a the portrait of Barnabas, but by a riddle he finds in an old book:
The Madonnas rest high above
The Lion’s head watches the dove
And in the womb beneath the hill
A blazing light glows bright and still.
As in the show, so in the movie Willie opens the coffin expecting to find a fortune in jewels, only to find Barnabas’ hand darting for his throat. As in the show, the movie version of Willie becomes a slave whom Barnabas beats unmercifully.
Now, the show is set in the year 1840. Karlen plays Desmond Collins. An evil spirit emanating from a severed head Desmond brought home with him from Macau has taken control of him. As Willie heard the heartbeat from the portrait of Barnabas, so Desmond hears a voice from the head. The head wants to be reunited with its body, which is buried somewhere in the Collinsport area. Yesterday Desmond brought a man named Otis Greene to his room. Greene was under the head’s control in 1803, when he brutally murdered four people. Desmond showed the head to Otis, who was horrified. Desmond demanded to know where the body was, and kept shouting in Otis’ ear even after Otis clutched his chest and started gasping. He managed to get a few cryptic remarks out of Otis before he fell dead to the floor: “The noose, a ring of gold, the stairs, top of the hill, direct line, an unmarked stone.”
A woman named Leticia Faye enters. Leticia sees Otis’ body on the floor and asks Desmond why he killed him. Leticia has psychic powers, so she quickly realizes that it was not really Desmond, but the head that is responsible. Desmond menaces her and demands she keep quiet.
Later, Leticia returns to the room and notices the body is gone. When she asked “Where’s the body?,” my wife, Mrs Acilius, laughed out loud. It’s as if she is noticing that Desmond has removed a piece of furniture. Desmond says that Otis’ son came and took it away. One might wonder how that went. There were no telephones in 1840, and we haven’t seen any servants at Desmond’s house. So Desmond must have gone to Greene’s son in person, told him he had his father’s body in his room, and asked him to come fetch it.
Leticia herself is a reference to Willie’s early days on the show. As seagoing con man Jason McGuire brought Willie to Collinwood to play a never-specified part in his plan to cheat the Collinses out of their money, so seagoing con man Gerard Stiles brought Leticia to play a never-specified part in his pursuit of the same objective. Before we saw Willie, we saw Jason talking on the telephone to someone named Chris who wanted to join him at Collinwood and with whom he had an ambivalent relationship. We might have assumed that “Chris” was short for some such name as Christine or Christabel and that she was a girlfriend or wife who was going to complicate Jason’s plans to impose himself on matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. When the name Chris was dropped and Willie put in its place, we saw it wasn’t quite that way, but as Dennis Patrick played Jason and both James Hall and John Karlen played Willie, we wondered if it might have been somewhat that way. There was something a lot more complicated in the emotions they showed in their scenes together than what could be explained by what we saw.
Leticia is upset with Gerard these days. He married Samantha Collins, widow of Quentin Collins, lady of the great house of Collinwood, and sole heiress to the Collins fortune. That seemed to seal his triumph, and left Leticia out in the cold. The marriage was only a few hours old when it turned out Samantha wasn’t a widow after all. Quentin turned up alive and well six months after he went missing during a mishap at sea. Now Samantha has to decide whether to go back to Quentin, leaving Gerard where he started, or to go with Gerard, going him a wife to support somehow. Leticia mocks Gerard bitterly for the dismal alternatives he now faces.
House of Dark Shadows left the audience to do a lot of guesswork as to how the characters got from one place to another, and indeed as to where exactly any given scene was supposed to be taking place. Among other things, it never explained how the riddle led Willie to the mausoleum. Today, Desmond goes to his cousin Gabriel Collins to ask for help deciphering Otis’ cryptic remarks. Gabriel mentions a place called Gallows Hill; that reminds Desmond that Otis said his grandfather was the executioner, and between them they figure out where to go.
In both #210 and House of Dark Shadows, Willie opened the secret panel in the mausoleum in the old cemetery by pulling a ring that was connected to a cable. Today, Desmond pulls a ring on a small headstone in an old cemetery and opens a secret panel on the ground next to it. As Willie walked down stone steps and found a chained coffin behind the panel, Desmond walks down stone steps and finds a coffin. This coffin is held shut, not by chains, but by a large cross wedged between it and the ceiling of the chamber.
Desmond finds that the lid of the coffin is divided into two parts. He can open the small part at one end. inside it, he finds what Willie had hoped to find, many precious jewels. They are embedded in a golden face mask.
