Hellhouse

I dreamed a new episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer last night. Well, half an espisode. I woke up before the resolution.

It begins in an old house. Three or four vamps are gathered there. Spike is also there, but not with the other vamps. He seems to be mildly insane in this episode, a la the beginning of Season 7. He's also got a beard. A force moves over the house, and everything inside it. It changes the vampires. They're still vampires, but it's a new kind of vampire. It changes Spike, too, but possibly not in exactly the same way. When the transformation is complete, the black vampire picks up a book. It looks like a copy of the Bible, but it was also changed. "We got oursel's a new religion!" the black vampire announces. "Time to go spread the word."

(At this point, I seem to have been on the set while they were shooting the episode, as I ran up and grabbed one of the new bibles to see what they'd done to them. I was disappointed to discover that it was only a mockup. The first half inch or so of pages were vampified bible verses, but the rest was advertising and random garbage that had been thrown in to fill out the thickness of the book. Back to the episode...)

Spike's close enough to hear the announcement, but remains unseen by the other vamps. He's crawling deep into the house. I get the impression that he knows exactly what's going on, and that...either it can't last or that the transformation isn't what it seems to be. There's a sense that the change is all on the outside, that the inside core is as rotten as ever.

Cut to Buffy. She's on the third floor hallway of a university building that is also, in some sense, the same house that the vamps were in. She's sitting behind a table full of candies and little trinkets to sell, and has chosen the third floor specifically because almost no one ever comes clear up there. Enter three or four college students, one of them from my Math143 class. They come up to buy some things from Buffy. A door is open across from her table. Vaguely Germanic hymn music comes out of the door. The customers glance at it and make a face. "Not them again," one of them says.

"Them?" Buffy asks.

"Oh, this new religious group on campus."

The music suddenly changes. It's something with a pop beat, though the minor tones remain. Suddenly Buffy's customers are interested in what might be going on behind the door. The furniture and people have changed from their last glimpse. It was dark and shadowy the first time; now there's light. Also, all the people in the room now have white skin. The customers walk right inside...and disappear. Naturally this gets Buffy's attention. She follows them in.

It seems like an ordinary enough room, but it's somehow closed off. It works by making people not want to leave. At the right, the first slayer is, er, sitting. Sort of. She's in something like a cocoon, so it's hard to tell what position her legs and feet are in. She looks like an artistic representation of the crescent moon with a woman's face, somehow. There's a piano or organ somewhere near the first slayer, but mostly the room feels like a library. Lots of books on the walls. Colors all browns and beiges.

...and that's where I woke up...

I do know/remember that it was possible to leave the "house" once you'd entered it, but the house made you not want to leave. I also know that the changed vamps were going around preaching their "good news," which probably went something like "Drink from me and never die." And the "house" seems to be more of an essence of a house, so that it could come upon any structure and that structure would become The House. So we've got overtones of the First Evil, the Haunted House from Season 4, the time they got trapped in Buffy's house by Anyanka's best friend, and probably others that I'm not noticing yet.