Title: Night Visitor
Author: jordannamorgan
Fandom: Dark Shadows (1966)
Characters: Barnabas, Julia, briefly David.
Setting: General.
Rating: G.
Length: 1,725 words.
Summary: When Julia falls ill, she is comforted by a mysterious visitor.
Notes: Also written for the prompt of “Things That Go Bump in the Night” at genprompt_bingo.



When Julia came down with pneumonia, it was the worst thing she had felt since the time she was bitten by a vampire.

She was so weak that she barely had any will to move. Despite a fever, she shivered with chills. She was nauseous, her head ached, and her breathing was labored, hindered by incessant deep coughs that felt as if they were scraping her lungs raw.

Resigned to her bed for the better part of a week, Julia had no shortage of company. Elizabeth and Carolyn not only tended to the needs of the doctor who had so often cared for them, they would sit with her for hours and try to divert her mind with feminine chatter. David brought her flowers from the garden, and Quentin tried to offer her his own very nineteenth-century remedies of an alcoholic variety. Even the ever-busy Roger briefly stepped in a few times to see how she was faring.

And of course there was Barnabas, who would come to visit her for a little while after sunset. He was politely and sincerely concerned for her, but always rather awkward, as if the memory of sickness was so far in his own past that he wasn’t sure how to respond to it in others. This timidity of bedside manner was so unlike him that Julia found it terribly endearing. The self-assured and calculating vampire could smirk at the threat of witches and werewolves, but the machinations of tiny bacteria left him almost amusingly at a loss.

However, Julia’s most intriguing visitor—and perhaps her most comforting—would appear only in the deepest, darkest hours of the night, after she had finally fallen asleep.

She first became aware of it on the second night of her bed rest, when a coughing fit jarred her half-awake. The heaviness across her lungs seemed so much more pronounced than earlier that her clinical mind gave a spike of alarm; but then she realized that the slight added pressure was a very tangible physical weight. There was literally something on her chest.

In the dark of her bedroom, Julia’s hand reached up, only to encounter something distinctly… fuzzy.

At her touch, the tensing of a small wiry frame beneath her fingers was equally plain. It sat frozen as her fingers roamed just a little clumsily across a furry head and shoulders, making out a shape roughly the size of a kitten.

Things started to make sense then. David had been known to sneak strays into the house despite Elizabeth’s disapproval. Some new foundling of his must have wriggled out through a bedroom door left ajar, and gone wandering until it came across the excessive warmth that radiated from Julia’s fever-stricken body.

The boy would receive a sound scolding if anyone else saw the animal. She would have to speak to him about this—and about giving the little thing a bath, as well. The stiff, scruffy fur under her hand definitely needed something to soften it to a proper kittenly fluff.

But still, in the meantime…

Her fingers traced between the animal’s ears, scritching gently. After a brief moment of hesitation, its body relaxed beneath her touch, settling lightly onto her chest once more.

Julia didn’t even know when she fell asleep petting her small unseen visitor.



Sometime after dawn, Julia finally came awake just enough to remember the animal—and she started to full alertness. It was gone as if it had never been there, leaving her to wonder if it had only been a dream.

Yet on the next night, she woke from the discomfort of low-grade fever-heat to feel that furry body curled on top of the covers yet again.

This time it barely flinched when she touched it. After a little while, it even leaned its head into her drowsy stroking, inviting more scritches at the back of its unexpectedly large ears. Its presence was more comforting than Julia would ever have expected: the mere sense that she wasn’t alone, the soothing rhythm of repetitive motion as she petted it.

For two nights more, the pattern repeated. The animal came to her sometime in the night, only to disappear before she fully awakened in the morning.

The day after the fourth nocturnal visit, Carolyn asked David to bring a cup of chicken soup to Julia. This finally gave her the chance to speak to him about his presumed stray.

“David, I’m afraid you’d better do something about that kitten you’ve been hiding before Elizabeth finds out. It’s been wandering into my room every night.”

Rather than guilt, it was only surprise and confusion that came over David’s face. “What kitten?”

Julia raised an eyebrow. Disobedience to the house rules was an infraction that a boy would be inclined to lie about, of course, but his reaction felt entirely genuine. David really wasn’t all that good at lying—at least, as long as there weren’t any vengefully fixated ghosts lurking around and meddling with his head. (She really didn’t think that was the case now. …Hell, she hoped not.)

“You mean you haven’t snuck a kitten into the house?” Julia queried, just to be sure.

Wide eyes stared back at her. “No, honest!”

Yes, she was certain he wasn’t lying. Which left her with one question that burned as hot as her fever:

Just what has been visiting me at night?



Curiosity and concern were more than enough to fend off Julia’s fatigue that night, especially since she was beginning to recover from her illness. She lay awake for hours, listening to the silence of the house and watching moonlit shadows in the darkened room, waiting for her nocturnal guardian to appear.

Yet she never did see or hear it first. She only felt a slight shifting movement near the foot of the bed, followed by a small body squirming up over the blankets.

Calm and unhurried, like each of the nights before, Julia reached out to let her fingers be sniffed and offer a head-scritch in greeting. Her touch was received without hesitation. She rubbed between the animal’s ears, lightly scratching across its shoulders and down its back… and her hand strayed furtively toward its side, trying to take in more of its shape than she had bothered to before.

As her fingers ghosted across something like leather and bone, her eyes grew wide.

Julia sharply sat halfway up, all but dislodging the creature onto her lap—and into the one shaft of moonlight that fell across the comforter. The thing was still a mass of shadows, but she caught the glitter of startled red-tinged eyes, the faintest outline of tangled wings.

“Barnabas…?”

The name was barely off her lips before the bat vanished like smoke; and then Julia was alone, sitting up in the bed, with her hands pressed over her mouth to stifle both laughter and tears.



Barnabas did not visit Julia again, either in his own form or that of the bat, for the further two nights she was confined to her bed. In a sense it was understandable, but it still caused her some concern. Once she was well enough to be up and about, her first priority was to see him—even if venturing outside in the dark autumn chill was hardly the best thing for her recovering health. So she went out just after sunset, making her way to the Old House.

When the vampire opened the door to find Julia standing there, he couldn’t meet her eyes. If his complexion hadn’t been so bloodless, she knew his face would have been scarlet with awkward embarrassment.

With that confirmation, so many questions both personal and clinical flooded through her mind; but all she could do was take pity on him, smiling up at his averted face.

“Thank you, Barnabas.”

Clearly not needing to be told what she was thanking him for, he shifted and flashed her an uncomfortable, almost irritated glance. “I simply wanted to monitor your breathing, so that if your condition grew worse, I would have been able to alert someone. …You know that I’ve seen what such sicknesses can do.”

A pang squeezed Julia’s heart as she remembered Sarah—or at least the lonely, elusive ghost that was all she had known of the child. Long ago, Barnabas had watched his precious little sister die of a fever. Even if he understood that illnesses like pneumonia were now rendered far less of a threat by modern antibiotics, it was no wonder he’d been distressed to see similar symptoms in…

In someone he cared about.

After all, his explanation didn’t account for why he would stay after Julia realized his presence. It didn’t account for why this tragically aloof and dignified being had permitted such shockingly familiar contact: suffering her to touch his transformed body, to pet him like a kitten until she relaxed and went to sleep again.

The warm happy feeling Julia had felt when she first saw him fidgeting in the doorway came flooding back, and she couldn’t help but startle him with an abrupt hug. Even through his prim modern suit, she could feel the lack of warmth in his own flesh, the silence of the heart in his chest; but after a moment his uncertain stiffness eased, and he gingerly put one arm around her shoulders.

In that gesture, there was more than warmth enough.

“You shouldn’t be out in the cold.” As he ushered her inside, all the deadly inhuman strength of that arm against her back was restrained to a gentle firmness. “Come and sit down. I’ll have Willie make you some tea. And since I can hardly let you walk back to Collinwood in the night air, I…” A pensive pause. “I’ll see to it that Josette’s room is prepared for you to rest in until morning.”

Julia started, glancing up at his face in profile as he guided her to a chair. His expression was unreadable, but the very fact that he would offer her such a cherished sanctum made her heart swell with emotion.

While his supportive arm was still around her, she leaned into him briefly, a gentle nudge of affection to express her gratitude; and when he almost imperceptibly squeezed her against his side in turn, that feeling alone was worth every moment of discomfort in her illness.

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2022 Jordanna Morgan